JERUSALEM (AP) – An Israeli military court has sentenced a leading Palestinian lawmaker to two years in prison in a plea deal that found her guilty of a banned group. But the court found insufficient evidence to file serious charges against her, the military said Tuesday.
Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been detained free of charge since October 2019. Her sentence will include the length of time which means she will be released in October.
Israel, along with the US and other Western allies, views the PFLP as a terrorist group.
Jarrar has been in and out of Israeli prison for the past few years. She was sentenced in 2015 to 15 months on charges of incitement and membership of the PFLP. But much of the time, she has been detained in administrative detention, a controversial Israeli policy in which Palestinian suspects can be detained for long periods.
In a statement Tuesday, the military said Jarrar admitted to holding a position in the PFLP from 2016 until her arrest in 2019 and in the role she received reports and other unspecified information.
Yet the statement acknowledged that the case suffered from “significant evidentiary problems” and that Jarrar “had nothing to do with the organizational or military aspects of the organization.”
Jarrar’s husband, Ghassan, said the sentence was “an expression of the nature of Israel’s occupation” of the Palestinian territories.
“There are no specific charges against her other than that she was elected to the Legislative Council on a list that Israel rejects,” Ghassan Jarrar said. “This is a political persecution.”