Far-left reporter questioned over praise for Palestinians who attack IDF troops, settlers

Far-left journalist Israel Frey was questioned by police today on allegations of incitement to terrorism.

A police spokesman says officers interrogated the independent ultra-Orthodox reporter regarding several posts he made on X over the past year, citing one particular comment from last summer.

“A Palestinian who attacks an IDF soldier or a settler in the apartheid territories is not a terrorist. And this is not a terror attack,” the spokesman quotes from his social media. “He is a hero who struggles against an oppressor for justice, liberation and freedom.”

Frey doubles down on his comment and other similar ones, insisting that the posts police presented him with during the interrogation “draw a simple, factual, moral and necessary distinction between abhorrent harm to innocent people and resistance against security forces.”

“In their hearts, the investigators also know that the effort to charge me with support for terrorism is a despicable attempt at persecution aimed to obscure the very existence of the debate over the legality and morality of security forces’ actions,” he continues on X.

Officers summoned him for questioning in response to a complaint by right-wing nonprofit Btsalmo, and have released him without conditions.

Btsalmo director Shai Glick says in a statement that Frey’s tweets are “not just incitement to murder IDF soldiers. He even went so far as to explicitly write that a Palestinian who murders a settler is a hero.”

Police say that the State Attorney’s Office approved their opening of an investigation earlier today.