The father of the Tamimi family was the first to be arrested by the Israeli army in the fall. On October 29, the 56-year-old Palestinian activist was stopped at the border between the occupied territories and Jordan, where he was on his way to meet an uncle and cousins living in the capital, Amman. He had just enough time to contact his wife, Nariman, to warn her. "I called him right back, but his phone had already been switched off," she said with a sigh, in the living room of her home in Nabi Saleh, in the center of the West Bank.

On November 2, Nariman Tamimi, wearing a burgundy hijab and black tunic, recounted the arrest, unaware that another would follow a few days later: On the night of November 6, around 15 Israeli army soldiers, followed by three Jeeps, came at around 3:30 am in one of the two streets of this village of 560 residents, all of them members of the Tamimi family. They had come to arrest her eldest daughter, 22-year-old Ahed, the most famous of Palestinian activists. Her family, the Tamimis, which includes thousands of members across the Arab world, is a clan unlike any other. Her activism, chronicled day after day on social media, is known the world over.

According to an Israeli army spokesperson, Ahed was charged with "incitement to terrorism." The Israeli authorities accused her of having published a message on Instagram on October 30, in Hebrew and Arabic, addressed to residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law: "We will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke. We will drink your blood and eat your skull." Several family members claim that the young law graduate, who does not speak Hebrew, "never wrote" these two sentences.

The Instagram account on which these threats were posted "is not hers," said Nariman Tamimi, who pointed to the existence of dozens of social media accounts in her daughter's name created by unknown individuals. After several days without news from her, she learned from a lawyer that her daughter had been transferred to Damon prison, south of Haifa in Israel, where she was allegedly "beaten." Nariman Tamimi claimed that the captain who handcuffed her daughter told her: "We started by arresting Bassem, I'm now arresting Ahed and I'll be back to arrest your son, Wa'ed, before I finish with you."

All aspects of Palestinian resistance

The Tamimi family claims a long line of agitators. They were forced into exile in the early 20^th century after an altercation with an Ottoman Empire guard (Palestine was under Ottoman rule for four centuries) and settled in Hebron, in southern Palestine. They also like to recall that, during the 1948 war, Ahed's great-grandparents fought alongside Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, one of the leaders of the Palestinian forces. Nariman and Bassem Tamimi, a law expert with a Palestinian women's rights NGO and an employee of the Palestinian Authority's Interior Ministry, are two influential opponents of Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

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