Police arrest leader of banned Islamic group in northern Israel

Islamic cleric Raed Salah was arrested overnight Tuesday following a raid on his home in the northern Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm.

Neighbors said large police forces arrived at the home in the Mahajaneh neighborhood of the city and searched the residence, and took Salah in for questioning. It was not immediately clear why he was arrested.

Salah has spearheaded campaigns asserting that “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” focused on the claim that Israel intends to change the status quo at the contested Temple Mount holy site in Jerusalem. The allegation, denied by Israel, was at the heart of last month’s violence and tensions surrounding the site.

One neighbor told the Ynet news site that the whole neighborhood was filled with police cars that were blocking the streets. “At first, I thought there was a murder,” he said.

Salah, the head of the outlawed Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, was released from prison in January after serving a nine-month sentence for incitement to violence and racism.

He was convicted over an inflammatory sermon he delivered in 2007 in Jerusalem in which he praised martyrdom for the sake of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, which sits atop the flashpoint Temple Mount holy site.

The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement was outlawed in November 2015. The government charged the group with links to terrorist groups and inciting a wave of violence. “Any person who belongs to this organization or who provides services to it or who acts within its framework is henceforth committing a criminal offense punishable by a prison sentence,” a cabinet statement said at the time. The move also allowed for the confiscation of all property belonging to the group.

The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement rejects the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and boycotts national elections on the grounds that they give legitimacy to the institutions of the Jewish state.

Founded in the 1970s, the Islamic Movement is a political organization, religious outreach group and social service provider rolled into one. The movement’s overarching goal is to make Israeli Muslims more religious and owes much of its popularity to providing services often lacking in Israel’s Arab communities. Today the group runs kindergartens, colleges, health clinics, mosques and even a sports league – sometimes under the same roof.

The movement split two decades ago. The more moderate southern branch began fielding candidates for the Knesset in 1996 and is now part of the Joint List, an alliance of several Arab political parties. Three of the Joint List’s 13 current Knesset members are part of the movement.

The northern branch had also funded a group called the Mourabitun, whose protests against Jewish visitors at the Temple Mount have occasionally turned violent. In September last year, Israel banned the group from the Mount.

Umm al-Fahem was the home of the three terrorists who carried out an attack last month at the Temple Mount, emerging from the holy site with guns they had smuggled onto it to shoot dead two Israeli police officers.

Some 3,000 people attended the funerals of the terrorists’ who perpetrated the July 14 attack. They were hailed as “martyrs for al-Aqsa” and “shahids [martyrs].”