By Abdel Raouf Arnaout
JERUSALEM (AA) – The U.S. has called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to release a dual U.S.-Palestinian national jailed by Ramallah earlier for selling property in East Jerusalem to Israeli settlers.
“The PA has been holding U.S. citizen Isaam Akel in prison for two months,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman tweeted on Wednesday.
“His suspected ‘crime’? Selling land to a Jew,” Friedman said, blasting Akel’s incarceration as “antithetical to the values of the U.S. and to all who advocate the cause of peaceful coexistence”.
He added: “We demand his immediate release.”
A Palestinian from East Jerusalem, Akel was reportedly jailed two months ago amid reports he had sold property in Jerusalem’s Old City to Jewish settlers.
In a related development, Israeli police over the past two days have reportedly arrested 44 Palestinian Fatah-linked activists in Jerusalem for “working for the Palestinian security services”.
While Ramallah has yet to formally respond to the U.S. request for Akel’s release, reports in the Israeli media suggest that the recent spate of arrests in Jerusalem is related to the PA’s refusal to release the dual national.
The Palestinian leadership suspended contact with the U.S. administration late last year after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a controversial decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Jerusalem remains at the heart of the decades-long Middle East conflict, with Palestinians hoping that East Jerusalem — occupied by Israel since 1967 — might one day serve as the capital of a Palestinian state.
International law continues to view East Jerusalem, along with the entire West Bank, as “occupied territory ” and considers all Jewish settlement construction there to be illegal.
