An Arab-Israeli teacher employed by a school in Nazareth was arrested after she posted a TikTok video that appeared to glorify Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 people, Channel 14 News reported on Tuesday.
The suspect, a 41-year-old resident of Tamra in the Lower Galilee, was arraigned in the Nazareth Magistrates Court on Tuesday morning after she was detained in an overnight police operation, according to the report.
In the video clip posted to TikTok on Monday, the teacher could be seen dancing to a popular song on the platform, which includes a line, “Good times.” It was accompanied by the caption, “On this day, 7/10/2023.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose ministry oversees the Israel Police, wrote in a post on X on Tuesday: “Yesterday, a teacher at a school in Nazareth uploaded a video to social media of her dancing to the song ‘Good Times’ against the background of the date 7.10.23.
“I forwarded the video to the unit that deals with online incitement that I established within the Israel Police, and she was immediately arrested at her home in Tamra,” the right-wing minister stated in the post, adding: “Zero tolerance for incitement and supporters of terrorism!”
Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech, a lawmaker for Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party, appealed to Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch (Likud Party) to fire the teacher immediately, the Maariv daily reported.
Following criticism of the arrest on social media, Israel’s State Attorney’s Office said in a statement that given “the circumstances of the incident as they have been published, it is not clear why the police decided to handcuff the suspect and blindfold her.”
מורה בישראל שמלמדת ילדים בבית ספר בנצרת העלתה הבוקר סרטון שמכעיס את הרשת ״ביום הזה״ (ה7 לאוקטובר) וברקע ריקוד ושיר ״זמנים טובים״. שלחתי הודעות גם לבית ספר ״אלקלעה״ בו היא מלמדת וגם אליה לקבל הבהרות, טרם התקבלה תגובה. מה לעזאזל? מה אומרים סרטון תמים או פחות. pic.twitter.com/2UFIAgDxrQ
— daniel amram - דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) October 7, 2024
In August, Israeli forces dismantled an Arab-Israeli terrorist squad that had detailed plans to carry out a combined shooting and bombing in the Galilee region, the country’s security agencies revealed on Sept. 26.
The cell, which was led by a resident of the town of Arraba in the Galilee and also included Palestinians from Judea and Samaria, was detained on Aug. 12, according to the Israel Police and Israel Security Agency.
Five months earlier, authorities nabbed 13 Arabs from northern Israel who were said to have been planning terrorist attacks on behalf of Hamas. The suspects, most of them residents of Sakhnin in the Lower Galilee, purchased weapons from terrorists in Judea and Samaria.
One-third of Israel’s 2.095 million Arab citizens believe that Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of primarily Jewish civilians is in line with Arab, Palestinian and Islamic values, according to a December 2023 poll.
