Ahed Tamimi: Israeli forces arrest Palestinian activist in West Bank

Ahed Tamimi became an international symbol of resistance to Israel's occupation as a teenager

The prominent Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi has been arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.

Ms Tamimi, 22, was detained overnight in the village of Nabi Saleh, the Palestinian Prisoners' Society said.

Israel's military told AFP news agency she was suspected of "inciting violence and terrorist activities".

Israeli media reported that Ms Tamimi was arrested in connection with a post on Instagram that threatened to "slaughter" Jewish settlers.

"[By comparison] you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke," she is purported to have written, referring to the mass murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, according to the newspaper Haaretz.

The post is no longer visible online, nor is the account carrying Ms Tamimi's name and photo where it was published last week.

Israel's far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted a photograph on X, formerly known as Twitter, that appeared to show an Israeli soldier restraining Ahed Tamimi in a bedroom.

He accused her of expressing "sympathy and support for the Nazi human beings on social media" and vowed: "Zero tolerance with terrorists and supporters of terrorism!"

However, Ms Tamimi's mother, Nariman, denied that she wrote the post.

"There are dozens of [online] pages in Ahed's name with her photo, with which she has no connection," she told AFP.

Ahed Tamimi became an international symbol of resistance to Israel's occupation as a teenager.

In 2015, the then-14-year-old was photographed biting an Israeli soldier who was trying to detain her younger brother.

Two years later, she was arrested after being filmed slapping and kicking an Israeli soldier during a confrontation outside her home. An Israeli court subsequently sentenced her to eight months in prison.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Society said Ms Tamimi was one of at least 70 Palestinians arrested in Israeli raids across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday night.

That raised to 2,150 the total reportedly detained there since 7 October, when Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel in which 1,400 people were killed and 240 were taken hostage.

Israel has bombarded Gaza continuously since then and sent in ground forces more than a week ago with the aim of destroying Hamas. More than 9,700 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The West Bank has seen an alarming surge in violence at the same time.

According to the UN, 141 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, most of them during confrontations that followed Israeli search-and-arrest raids or during protests in solidarity with Gaza.

It says eight others have been killed by Israeli settlers, who human rights groups have accused of escalating a campaign of violent attacks on Palestinian communities.

Two Israelis have been killed by Palestinians over the same period.

Some 600,000 Jews live in 140 settlements built since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.