Israeli police raided two Palestinian bookstores in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday, confiscating books and arresting one of the owners and his nephew, according to their family members.
CCTV footage shared by the owners, four brothers from the Muna family, shows police officers putting books in trash bags at one of the branches of the Educational Bookshop, a decades-old respected institution with Arabic- and English-language branches.
Photos shared by Muna of the Arabic-language store show books, notebooks and writing materials scattered on the ground.
Israeli police said in a statement Monday that two people were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism.”
“The suspects who allegedly sold the books were taken into custody by police detectives,” the police spokesperson’s unit said.
Israeli police said that “detectives encountered numerous books containing inciteful material with nationalist Palestinian themes” in the stores.
Among them was a children’s coloring book titled “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 Jordan River and the Mediterranean, but many Jews regard it as a call for Israel’s destruction.
The Educational Bookshop was established in 1984 on the central Salah el Dein street in East Jerusalem. The original branch sells Arabic books, while the English-language store opened years later is frequented by Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners alike.
The group “The Time Has Come”, which lobbies for peace between Jews and Palestinians, said the bookstore and its people “are an important part of the shared future we envision for Jerusalem. The arrest and confiscation not only harm the right to free expression and the freedom of information but also place the city’s future on the brink.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Territories, said she was “shocked by the raid” on the bookstores, which she called “an intellectual lighthouse and family-run gem resisting Palestinian erasure under apartheid.”
Albanese also urged the international community in Jerusalem to “show up, stand with the Muna family, and protect this vital hub.”
Correction: This article previously referred to “The Time Has Come” group as “Ad Kan.” The two groups are separate entities, and the comments in this article are those of “The Time Has Come.”