We speak with Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro after he was detained at an Israeli military base for seven hours on Friday. Amro, the founder of the Hebron-based group Youth Against Settlements, was helping a Palestinian family that he says had been attacked by armed Israeli settlers at their farmhouse outside Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Amro says when Israeli soldiers arrived, they ignored the settlers and instead targeted the Palestinians, including him. Amro tells Democracy Now! that soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded him before transporting him to the base in the back of a military vehicle. He was freed after an international outcry over his arrest.
“What happened to me is happening to many Palestinian families and many Palestinian human rights defenders and many Palestinian journalists,” says Amro. “It’s not the first time. It’s not the last time. We have to keep working to make occupation [and] apartheid costly and make this kind of human rights violation costly for the offenders.”
