Palestinians in Israel
Israel convicts Palestinian citizens for chanting wartime slogans
Palestinians in IsraelGraphic: Times of Palestine
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A Haifa court convicted two Palestinian citizens of Israel, the activist Mohammad Taher Jabareen, 31, and the attorney Ahmad Khalifa, 42, on 29 April over slogans they chanted at an anti-war protest in Umm al-Fahm — the first such conviction Adalah, the Haifa-based legal center, says it has documented since 7 October 2023.
What they were convicted for#
The protest, on 19 October 2023, followed the explosion at Gaza's al-Ahli Hospital.
Prosecutors charged the two men with "indirect incitement to terrorism" and "identification with a terrorist organization," carrying a combined maximum of eight years, over two chants: "With soul and blood, we redeem you, oh Gaza" and "There is no solution except uprooting the occupier." Proceedings ran more than 30 months, during which both men spent time in administrative detention before house arrest, Adalah's documentation shows.
What Adalah and rights advocates say it means#
"This decision is a continuation of the policy of persecuting Palestinians in Israel since October 7," Adalah's Hadeel Abu Saleh said of the verdict.
The human rights advocate Mohammad Zeidan warned it "opens the door to new legal precedents, whereby any slogan chanted at a protest could be treated as an offense" — a concern Adalah has raised across a wider docket of cases, including the pending sentencing of Sheikh Kamal Khatib, the former deputy chairman of the outlawed northern Islamic Movement branch, over a speech and two social media posts from May 2021, for which prosecutors are seeking 30 to 50 months.
Adalah's broader tracking describes Palestinian citizens' political and civic speech narrowing sharply since October 2023, with arrests over social media posts and administrative detention used against activists, a pattern the center says now includes prosecutions for words spoken and posted years before the war that a court is applying today's harsher standard to retroactively.
