RAMALLAH: Israeli authorities on Tuesday deported an international peace activist “for overstaying her visa,” the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said.
ISM said that Eva Novakova, a Czech national, “was deported from the Israeli Ben Gurion airport at 6 a.m. this morning to her country.” The movement added that Novakova served as the ISM’s media coordinator for the past three weeks.
The Czech pro-Palestinian activist arrived in Prague on Tuesday, officials said.
Israeli ambassador in Prague, Yaakov Levy, said that the activist was expelled for overstaying the three months permitted under her tourist status and for engaging in a “not bona fide tourist activity.”
“Her activities involved organizing demonstrations, which occasionally had been violent,” Levy said.
Israeli soldiers and immigration police detained Novakova, 28, in a night raid on her home in Ramallah in the West Bank, said the ISM, a pro-Palestinian group for which she worked before the expulsion.
The ISM said Israeli soldiers and the immigration police unit carried out the operation jointly. During the raid, the army occupied a number of rooftops at a location adjacent to the Palestinian police’s Ramallah headquarters.
Novakova’s lawyer, Omer Shatz, called the Israeli action against his client politically-motivated, a claim rejected by Levy.
“This arrest is part of the continued and illegal use of the immigration police against activists, for political purposes,” the statement by the pro-Palestinian group cited Shatz as saying. Shatz was quoted by ISM as saying that Israeli immigration police had no jurisdiction to detain her in the West Bank, in the Palestinian territories.
ISM added that the Israeli forces on early Tuesday arrested Ibrahim Amirah, the coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Nilin. Amirah, together with another activist, Zaidoun Srour, were arrested under suspicion of organizing anti-separation wall demonstrations in the village.
The ISM said, “The deportation of Novakova and arrests of activists are an escalation of an ongoing and extensive Israeli attempt to suppress the Palestinian popular resistance generally, and repress its leadership particularly.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces operating in West Bank cities arrested another seven Palestinians, Palestinian security sources said.
