After completing a 12-year sentence in Israeli prison, 34-year-old Moussa Darwish was immediately redetained by Israeli forces upon being released on Sunday.
Jerusalem Committee for Families of Prisoners head Amjad Abu Asab said that Israeli intelligence officers were waiting for Darwish outside of Ktziot prison to redetain him as they prevented his family — who had traveled to the southern Israeli prison to greet the freed man — to go near him.
According to Asab, Darwish spent 12 years in jail for his affiliation to the left-wing faction the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and for his alleged role in a plot to kill Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of Shas, an ultra-Orthodox religious political party in Israel.
Darwish, a resident of the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, was detained in March 2005, and was convicted the following December in the framework of a plea bargain in which he admitted that he had planned to murder the prominent rabbi, Israeli news site Ynet reported at the time.
However, Ynet reported that Darwish had been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the PLO’s most prominent leftist faction, and not the DFLP.
Asab noted in his statement Sunday that Darwish’s brother Majd Darwish was detained last week and sentenced to six months in administrative detention, Israel’s widely condemned policy of internment without trial or charge based on undisclosed evidence.
According to Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, some 6,500 Palestinians were held in Israeli custody as of January, 536 of whom were in administrative detention.
