First Israel silenced Palestinian citizens. Now it turns to their leaders
On June 23, after four hours of questioning, Mohammed Barakeh walked out of the police station in the Israeli settlement of Ariel. A longtime community leader and former head of the Jewish-Arab political party Hadash, Barakeh had most recently served from 2015 to 2025 as the chairman of the The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel (HFC), the main extra-parliamentary body representing Palestinians inside Israel.
After news broke of Barakeh’s interrogation, many Palestinian citizens questioned not why he had been summoned, but why now. Investigators were not concerned with a recent statement, nor with anything he had said after October 7 or throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Instead, they focused on a speech he delivered in Ramallah in 2022.
The interrogation came days after police ordered Barakeh to report to the Ariel police station in the occupied West Bank. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation but asked to be questioned at a police station inside Israel. According to the Haifa-based legal center Adalah, who submitted the request on Barakeh’s behalf, international law gives individuals the right to refuse to engage with or carry out activities in Israeli settlements.
But rather than grant Barakeh’s request, police issued an arrest warrant, detained him, and brought him to Ariel for questioning. He was later released under restrictive conditions, including a one-month ban on entering the West Bank, while police confiscated his two cell phones. Barakeh described the investigation as “political and provocative.”
For current HFC chairman Jamal Zahalka, the case is part of a broader campaign against Arab leadership. “They’re rummaging through drawers to find cases that can be revived specifically now,” he told +972 Magazine after Barakeh’s release. “The right wing is going through a difficult period. All the polls point to the possibility that it will lose power, and when it’s in a situation like that, it will do anything.”
This pattern of political persecution, thinly disguised in legal proceedings, is also evident in two court hearings scheduled for the coming weeks. On July 7, the Haifa Magistrate’s Court is expected to hear the State Attorney’s Office request to sentence Raja Eghbaria, a former leader of the HFC and of the secular nationalist movement Abnaa al-Balad, to between 18 and 40 months in prison for ten Facebook posts he published in 2017 and 2018. A week later, the Nazareth Magistrate’s Court is due to sentence Sheikh Kamal Khatib, the former deputy chairman of the outlawed northern branch of the Islamic Movement, for a speech and two social media posts from May 2021; in his case, the prosecution is seeking a 30 to 50 month prison sentence.
The three cases initially appear unrelated, yet they share two common features: All involve prominent Palestinian political leaders, and all concern speech that predated the current war by years. This suggests that the investigations and the demand for severe punishments are not related to the acts themselves, but rather must be understood against the backdrop of a dramatic crackdown on political expression inside Israel since October 7 — one that specifically targets Palestinians.
Hundreds of Palestinian citizens have been summoned for police questioning over social media posts, dozens have been indicted under the Counter-Terrorism Law, and legal proceedings have targeted students, actors, academics, artists, and political activists. At the same time, Israeli authorities have revived the use of administrative detention against Palestinian citizens, after years in which it had been reserved for exceptional cases.
Regarding the cases of Eghbaria and Khatib, the question before the courts is not just whether the speeches and posts crossed the boundaries of protected expression. It is also whether Palestinians can be sentenced according to a punitive policy adopted after October 7 for statements they made many years prior — a form of retroactive retribution.
If the courts ultimately adopt the sentencing requested by the State Attorney’s Office, it could set a new precedent for prosecuting cases involving Palestinian political expression. Such a standard would not be the work of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition or its political allies, but of Israel’s judiciary, which still presents itself as the guardian of the state’s democratic values.
Unequal convictions
In November 2025, the Haifa Magistrate’s Court convicted Eghbaria of incitement to terrorism and expressing support for a terrorist organization over ten Facebook posts. According to the indictment, the posts included photographs and messages about young Palestinians who carried out attacks and were subsequently killed, expressions of mourning for them, and material the prosecution argued amounted to praise for outlawed organizations.
Adalah, which represents Eghbaria, stresses that the court did not convict him of calling for attacks and that the prosecution presented no evidence that the posts led or were likely to lead to acts of violence. The defense further argued the reach of the posts was relatively limited compared with other cases heard by Israeli courts in recent years.
Eghbaria, now 74, has no prior criminal record and suffers from a complex medical condition. His case spans all the way back to September 2018, when he was first arrested for the posts and spent 40 days in detention, before being placed under house arrest for one year and nine months. Last year, he was also held for four months in administrative detention.
Khatib’s case centers on a speech and two social media posts during the events of May 2021, addressing Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, and police violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem. After years of legal proceedings, the court convicted him in June 2025 of incitement to violence and to terrorism, while acquitting him of expressing support for a terrorist organization — one of the indictment’s central charges.
Here, too, Adalah, argues that the case is not about violence attributed to Khatib or the consequences of his statements, but about the criminalization of Palestinian political discourse. According to the defense, the prosecution similarly failed to show either that Khatib’s statements led to acts of violence or created a real likelihood of such acts occurring.
In both the Eghbaria and Khatib cases, the legal battle has shifted from the subject of conviction to that of punishment: Prosecutors are seeking prison sentences far harsher than those imposed in comparable incitement cases. The case of Sheikh Raed Salah, the current leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, illustrates the comparison. In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld a nine-month prison sentence after Salah was convicted of incitement to violence. Today, prosecutors are seeking sentences of up to 40 months for Eghbaria and 50 months for Khatib, and unlike Salah, neither of them has a criminal record.
The disparity becomes particularly apparent when compared with incitement cases involving Jewish defendants, several of which were decided after October 7. Those cases involved explicit calls for murder, threats against judges, incitement against civilians, praise for murderers, and the brandishing of weapons. Some defendants had criminal records or held influential public positions. Yet the sentences they received were much more mild: Courts repeatedly settled for imposing community service, probation, or relatively short prison sentences.
In the 2025 case of Naftali Amar v. State of Israel, the defendant was convicted on eight counts of incitement to violence for social media posts he published between 2019 and 2021. Several of these voiced threats against officials involved in cases against Netanyahu; “I would have them executed by hanging in the square,” he wrote in one, and in another, “You need a big knife to spill their guts.” He was sentenced to a mere seven months of community service.
In State of Israel v. Yaakov Yitach, involving posts published after October 7, the defendant called for the murder of Supreme Court justices and their children, for breaking the arms and legs of protesters, and possessed videos that included threats of murder, rape, and the burning of homes and children intended for distribution. He received 10 months of community service.
Perhaps the clearest comparison is the case of State of Israel v. Yakir Ashbel, which concerned not online speech but a public celebration in which participants danced while waiving firearms, Molotov cocktails, and photographs of members of the Dawabsheh family murdered in the 2015 arson attack in Duma. Some participants held signs calling for “Revenge” and others burned and tore apart a photograph of the deceased infant Ali Dawabsheh. Several defendants also had prior criminal records or were convicted of additional offenses, including supporting a terrorist organization, incitement to racism, and weapons offenses. Nevertheless, the sentences for the convictions ranged between 180 hours and six months of community service.
A dangerous precedent
The aforementioned cases, cited by Adalah in its sentencing arguments in the Eghbaria case, suggest that the issue is considerably more broad than that of the fate of the Eghbaria and Khatib. Their cases serve as just the latest example of a deep and consistent disparity in the treatment of Palestinian and Jewish defendants in Israeli courts.
They also raise the concern that future cases related to political expression could be subject to this new punitive sentencing policy. In an article published last month, Barak Medina, an expert in constitutional law and former rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, warned of an “alarming erosion” in judicial protection for freedom of expression, particularly in cases involving Palestinian citizens of Israel.
According to Medina, Israeli courts have increasingly given greater weight to security considerations when adjudicating cases of political expression. This moves away from the established Supreme Court standard, which requires proof of a real possibility that speech would lead to violence when determining whether such expression constitutes incitement. He argues that the shift risks expanding criminal liability while narrowing the protections Israeli case law has traditionally afforded political expression.
Israel’s persecution of Arab leadership, as exemplified by the cases of Eghbaria, Khatib, and Barkakeh, also sets dangerous new precedents for freedom of expression — although this phenomenon is not new. Nearly two decades ago, the Mossawa Center documented dozens of criminal investigations and legal proceedings against Arab members of Knesset. The report concluded that, in many cases, the investigations themselves served as a form of deterrence and political pressure, even when they ended without indictments.
Back then, the focus was on elected representatives. Today, it has expanded to include political leaders outside the Knesset, as well as journalists, artists, academics and activists.
And while enforcement against political expression of Palestinian citizens has intensified, the crisis of organized crime has only continued to deepen. The murder clearance rate remains exceptionally low: Only about 12 percent of cases in the first half of 2026 Israeli law enforcement has classified as “solved,” according to the Abraham Initiatives.