400 Palestinians arrested for Facebook posts

The has been an increase in the number of Palestinian prisoners who are being held in in Israeli jails because of posts they have published on social networking sites since the start of the Jerusalem Intifada in October 2015.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported yesterday:

The Israeli intelligence services worked on the development of a database on Palestinians and their statements in social networking sites, known as Big Data. The screening of Palestinian publications and comments is done automatically. The system monitors all those who publish or comment in terms of future intentions to carry out operations against Israeli targets.

The aim of these measures is to “limit attacks”. “This method has proven to be effective in sorting out two supposed perpetrators of operations, placing them in the control department and arresting a part of them, and cooperating with the authority to prevent them from carrying out operations.”

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Haaretz revealed that the Israeli security system, identified 2,200 Palestinians through this method during the past year, and after further investigation, 400 were arrested on suspicious of their intent to carry out attacks. Some are being tried while others are being held under administrative detention.

The Israeli security system handed over a list of 400 other Palestinians to the security of the Palestinian Authority, who arrested them.

“The reason for the decrease in Palestinian attacks is due to the army’s activities and to reinforce the feeling among the Palestinians that the attacks did not achieve anything at the political level, in addition to steps taken by the Palestinian security services in preventing attacks and following the Israeli intelligence on what is happening on the social networks,” an Israeli security official said. “This is to try early identification of perpetrators of individual attacks.”

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