On Jan. 29, the Israeli Central Elections Committee will debate three petitions calling for Balad Knesset member Heba Yazbak to be barred from running for reelection on the Joint List. The petitioners — Knesset members Ofir Katz (Likud), Oded Forer (Yisrael Beitenu), and the extremist right-wing party Otzma Yehudit — charge that Yazbak supports terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Appended to the petitions are a slew of remarks said to prove that Yazbak praises terrorists. For example, the day after the killing of Samir Kuntar in December 2015, she posted his photo on her Facebook page and wrote, “I did not return from Palestine [referencing his years in an Israeli jail] only in order to return to Palestine” and referred to him as “al-shahid al-mujahid,” which roughly translates as “martyred warrior.”

In April 1979, Kuntar and another person entered the home of the Haran family in the Israeli-Lebanese border town of Nahariya, kidnapped the father, Danny, and his four-year-old daughter Einat, and took them to the beach. Israeli soldiers surrounded them and Kuntar shot Danny dead and crushed Einat’s skull with the butt of his Kalashnikov. In 2008, he was released from an Israeli jail as part of a deal with Hezbollah, in return for the bodies of Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser, two Israeli soldiers abducted by the organization. After Kuntar's release, he joined Hezbollah's senior leadership and eventually landed on the United States' terror watch list. In 2015, he died in Syria in an attack on the building in which he was staying. The rebel Free Syrian Army, opposed to President Bashar al-Assad's regime, claimed responsibility, but Hezbollah blamed the Israeli air force for Kuntar's assassination.

Kuntar was not the only person Yazbak honored with the designation mujahid (holy warrior). Over the years, Yazbak shared posts and photos of other shahids (martyrs) with blood on their hands. In 2013, for example, she posted a photo of Dalal Mughrabi and wrote, “She managed to do so much although she was killed at the age of 20. I salute women’s resistance.” Mughrabi was a member of a Palestinian Fatah terror squad that infiltrated Israel from Lebanon in 1978 and hijacked a bus near Haifa. Thirty-five Israelis, including 12 children, died in the attack.