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Palestinian lawmaker detained by Israeli military court

Palestinian legislator Khalida Jarrar, accused of calling for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, has been detained for several months now by an Israeli military court based on classified evidence, while her husband says the court has avoided examining evidence of her innocence.
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The story of the arrest and trial of Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian parliamentarian representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has cast an embarrassing and even ridiculous light on the Israeli military justice system. “If it weren’t sad and if it weren’t about my wife, it would be funny,” her husband, Ghassan Jarrar, who has attended all his wife’s legal proceedings at the military courthouse in Camp Ofer, told Al-Monitor. Her attorney, Mahmoud Hassan, said, “It’s a circus, a charade. There’s no other way to describe what has taken place and is still happening.”

A police officer testified at a Nov. 8 hearing that a Palestinian witness had said during a Shin Bet interrogation that the witness had heard Khalida Jarrar call for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers; the witness said this had occurred at an event commemorating the assassination of PLFP leader Abu Ali Mustafa a year earlier. The witness later retracted his testimony, refused to take the stand and was declared a hostile witness. During the hearing, the police officer was asked to provide the court with details about the interrogation and the testimony of that Palestinian witness. At that point, Jarrar’s attorney presented several photos that had been shown to the Palestinian witness from which he had to single out Jarrar. For all intents and purposes, it was a lineup in which seven facial photos were shown. As it turns out, six were male and only one was female, the latter being Jarrar.

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