Two historical bookstores of Jerusalem in the sights of the Israeli police, arrested the owners

Two historical bookstores by Gerusalemme Est occupied, Specialized in volumes on Palestinian history and identity, they ended up in the sights of the Israeli police who made a rather aggressive raid and arrested two owners. The condemnation of defenders of human rights, intellectual, including Italians, who denounce the violence of the agents. This morning, about sixty people gathered before a court of Jerusalem As a sign of solidarity with the two Palestinian booksellers Arrested yesterday in the eastern sector of the city, occupied and annexed by Israel since 1967.

Inside the court there are Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna, the owner and his nephew, waiting for the preliminary hearing. Both work for the Educational Bookshop, a cultural institution of East Jerusalem, with branches in Arabic and English. The filming of the surveillance cameras shared by the owners, four brothers of the Muna family, show the police officers who put books in the garbage bags in one of the branches of the Educational Bookshop, open for decades.

“They threw some books on the ground, but the material damage was caused in the Arabic language shop,” one of the owners of the shop, Iyad Muna, told CNN.

The photos shared by Muna of the Arabic language shop show Books, notebooks and material to write scattered on the ground. The lawyer of the Muna family, Nasser Odeh, confirmed that “hundreds of pounds” were seized in the late afternoon yesterday. “The police officers of the District of Jerusalem arrested two residents of East Jerusalem suspected of having sold books that incite hatred,” the police spokesman Dean Elsdunne said in a note. During the operation, the police found books on “Palestinian nationalists”, Elsdunne stressed, indicating that the police were asking the court to extend the detention of Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna. The charge formalized against them is that of “sale of books containing incitement and support for terrorism”.

Among these was a coloring book for children entitled “From the river to the sea”. The expression is politically controversial in Israel. Some Palestinians use the phrase in support of a homeland between the Giordano river and the Mediterranean, but many Jews consider it an appeal to the destruction of Israel.

“It is incredible, we come to this library for generations,” Testa Sidra Ezrahi, an 80-year-old Israeli-American woman who took part in the protest. “In my 60 years I have seen everything here, but this (the arrest of the booksellers) is still incredible, This is what the fascist states are doing “.” Signed by the Raid of Israeli forces to the East East Educational Library, a lighthouse of intellectual life and a family jewel that resists the cancellation of all Palestinian traces under the apartheid “, he commented On X Francesca Albanese, special speaker of the United Nations for the Palestinian territories.

The educational library was founded in 1984 in the central via Salah el Dein in Jerusalem Est. The original branch sells Books in Arabic, while the English -language shop open years later is frequented by Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners, including very diplomatic. The group “The Time Has Come”, which makes pressure for peace between Jews and Palestinians, said that the library and its people “are an important part of the shared future that we imagine for Jerusalem. The arrest and confiscation not only They damage the right to free expression and freedom of information, but also put the future of the city on the edge of the abyss “.