Police on Sunday morning moved to arrest former Knesset member Hanin Zoabi on charges of public identification with a terrorist group and incitement to commit a terrorist act.
Zoabi, a Muslim who served as a lawmaker for the Arab nationalist Balad Party between 2009 and 2019, was arrested after the Israeli Attorney General’s Office approved the police investigation.
Police confirmed it arrested a 59-year-old woman from Nazareth “on charges of incitement and identification with a terrorist organization, based on statements she made during a speech at an anti-Israel conference abroad.
“In recent months, several complaints were received regarding the statements she made at the summit. After gathering evidence and reviewing it with relevant authorities, it was concluded that her statements raised suspicions of the offenses,” the statement continued.
“This morning, after receiving the appropriate approvals, Northern District police detained the suspect for questioning,” police added.
Speaking at the “Palestine Conference” in Vienna in October 2024, Zoabi hailed the Hamas war, which the terrorist organization started on Oct. 7, 2023, by massacring 1,200 people in Israel, as an achievement by the “resistance,” saying it managed to “take out Zionism from its balance.
“The two options that the Palestinians have is either to kill us in this massive way of genocides, or a slow death, a slow suffocation, a slow oppression,” the former lawmaker claimed, adding, “This is what we resist, and it is not Hamas who resists it, it is the Palestinian people.
“You cannot differentiate between Hamas and the Palestinian people—you cannot differentiate between them—and don’t talk about the 7th of October,” Zoabi continued.
According to her, 70% of the terrorists who breached the Jewish state’s internationally recognized border on Oct. 7 “didn’t enter the Israeli borders; they entered their own land” they were dispossessed from.
“This is their land, and you [Israel] has kicked them out of their land,” Zoabi declared in her remarks, drawing applause from the audience.
In January, Likud Knesset member Ariel Kallner urged action to revoke Zoabi‘s citizenship for the speech she gave at the conference in Austria.
“There is no place in the State of Israel for supporting atrocities the likes of which have not occurred since the Holocaust,” Kallner declared in a letter to then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel. He added: “Anyone who crosses this red line does not deserve Israeli citizenship.”
The former MK has faced multiple criminal convictions in the past.
In 2021, she was found guilty in a plea bargain of fraud and forgery tied to campaign financing of the Balad Party, receiving a suspended sentence and fines after more serious charges were dropped.
In 2016, she was convicted of insulting a public servant after branding Arab Israel police officers “traitors” and “collaborators.” The lawmaker was handed a six-month suspended prison term in a plea agreement.
