CNN
—
Israeli police are seeking to keep a well-known Palestinian journalist in detention in Jerusalem on charges related to “incitement” and “support of terrorism,” despite an Israeli judge ordering her release on Monday.
Latifeh Abdellatif is a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in Reuters, ABC News, BBC, Al Jazeera and TRT, according to her Instagram account biography.
Israeli police said that she was apprehended at her home in the Old City on Sunday by Jerusalem District Police officers “on suspicion of incitement and support for terrorism.”
Abdellatif’s lawyer and her mother said she was arrested in the street on her way home, by officers arriving in unmarked vehicles.
Abdellatif denies the charges.
In a statement, police pointed to Abdellatif’s posting of a video of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in which he says he wants to die as a “martyr.”
“In these and other posts, it is evident that the suspect praises and glorifies the actions of terrorist organizations,” the statement said.
Abdellatif appeared via video link at a magistrates’ court in Jerusalem on Monday, where a judge denied a police request to detain her for an additional five days in order to continue interrogations and investigation. At one point during the hearing, Abdellatif smiled and made a heart-shaped gesture with her hands.
“The court found that based on her work as a journalist and based on the defense that these posts are part of her professional work, and that the posts are more than six months old, there is no need for keeping her in detention and she doesn’t create a danger to the public,” Abdellatif’s lawyer Nasser Odeh told CNN after the hearing.
Odeh said the judge ordered Abdellatif’s release “under restrictive conditions.”
He said this included 2,000 Israeli shekels ($550) to be paid for bail and another 10,000 shekels as a guarantee that she would show up once called in for investigation.
However, Israeli police immediately appealed the decision, seeking to stop her release.
“The police have requested to freeze the decision of the release until they submit an appeal with the central court. Right now, the release decision has been frozen until the appeal process goes into effect,” the lawyer said.
Odeh told CNN that Abdellatif had been interrogated for three hours on Sunday “about social media posts that are part of her professional work as a journalist.”
Abdellatif lives and works in Jerusalem. She has in the past reported on the tensions around access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound, monitoring clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers in the Old City.
CNN has witnessed her being harassed by Israeli security forces in the Old City on several occasions in the past, including being physically pushed aside and verbally abused. None of the occasions witnessed by CNN involved Abdellatif doing anything other than quietly standing on the side and using her camera to capture the events.
Abdellatif’s mother told CNN on Monday her daughter is a working single mother to a 7-year-old son and that she “has all the beautiful things in her character.”
Several of Abdellatif’s colleagues described her as “professional” and “dedicated.” One said she was “very kind and goes out of her way to help everyone, is respectable, and has good manners.”
One journalist told CNN that reporters in Jerusalem “are more concerned and afraid to cover the news that deals with Palestinian matters because it can easily be brought upon us as an incitement charge.”
Another journalist said that Jerusalem-based reporters feel “targeted by Israel security after the (October 7 Hamas attacks) for the smallest things.”
None of the journalists wanted to be named for fear of repercussions.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that since the start of the war in Gaza, an “unprecedented” number of journalists and media workers have been arrested in what they and their attorneys say is retaliation for their journalism and commentary.
As of March 13, 2025, CPJ had documented a total of 75 arrests of journalists in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Israel arrested 70; Palestinian authorities arrested five, it said.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned Abdellatif’s arrest on Monday. In a statement, the syndicate said Israeli security authorities “have arrested and expelled eight journalists from the Old City and al-Aqsa Mosque since the beginning of this month.”
