Israeli police have confiscated hundreds of books with Palestinian titles or flags without understanding their contents in a draconian raid on a Palestinian educational bookshop in occupied East Jerusalem, say eyewitnesses.

More details have emerged on the Israeli police raid on a popular bookstore in occupied East Jerusalem.

The owners were arrested but police reportedly dropped charges of incitement while still detaining them for “disturbing the public order”.

The bookstore’s owners, Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, were detained, and hundreds of titles related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict confiscated, before police ordered the store’s closure, according to May Muna, Mahmoud’s wife, reports Al Jazeera.

She said the soldiers picked out books with Palestinian titles or flags, “without knowing what any of them meant”.

She said they used Google Translate on some of the Arabic titles to see what they meant before carting them away in plastic bags.

Another police bookshop raid
Police raided another Palestinian-owned bookstore in the Old City in East Jerusalem last week. In a statement, the police said the two owners were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism”.

As an example, the police referred to an English-language children’s colouring book titled From the River to the Sea — a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that today includes Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The bookshop raids have been widely condemned as a “war on knowledge and literature”.

The Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem is full with shoppers in solidarity a day after the Israel Police raided the Palestinian store, arrested its owners and confiscated books. They dropped the charges of incitement but still detain them for ‘disturbing the public order’ pic.twitter.com/ZfnkBttfY3

— David Issacharoff (@davidiss) February 10, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz