Prominent 22-year-old Palestinian protester Ahed Tamimi arrested by Israel on suspicion of "inciting violence"

The Israel Defense Forces said it arrested prominent 22-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi on Monday during a raid in the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh. The IDF said Tamimi was "suspected of inciting violence and calling for terrorist activity to be carried out," and that she was "transferred to Israeli security forces for further questioning."

An Israeli military official forwarded CBS News a screenshot of what they called "an example of Ahed Tamimi's inciting violence from her social media account."

The post, which appears to be an Instagram story posted by the account "ahed_tamimi15," shows text in Hebrew and Arabic threatening the murder of Israeli settlers and referring to Hitler.

CBS News has been unable to independently verify that the account belongs to Tamimi. Her mother, Nariman al-Tamimi, told the AFP news agency that her daughter did not write the post.

"There are dozens of (online) pages in Ahed's name with her photo, with which she has no connection," Nariman al-Tamimi told AFP.

Ahed Tamimi became famous at age 14 when she was filmed biting an Israeli soldier who was pushing her then 12-year-old brother down on a rock. She was then arrested in 2017 for slapping and kicking two Israeli soldiers who were in the yard of her family home after telling them to leave. She was sentenced to eight months in jail for assaulting the troops.

"We hope that this generation will be stronger than us, and can take the flag from us with more power and more serious resistance to end the [Israeli] occupation," Ahed's father Bassem Tamimi, a longtime Palestinian activist, said at the time of her arrest in 2017.

In:
• Israel
• Palestinians
• West Bank

Haley Ott

Haley Ott is an international reporter for CBS News based in London.

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