Police detain far-left reporter for praising attacks on soldiers, settlers

Far-left journalist Israel Frey was questioned by police on Wednesday on allegations of incitement to terrorism after he praised attacks on IDF soldiers and West Bank settlers.

Officers interrogated the reporter, a rare ultra-Orthodox figure on the largely secular far left, regarding several posts he made on X, specifically his post claiming Palestinian attacks on IDF soldiers and West Bank settlers do not constitute terrorism.

“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. He is a hero who struggles against an oppressor for justice, liberation and freedom,” wrote Frey, referring to the West Bank, which is controlled by Israel, but has not been annexed, as quoted by a police spokesman.

Frey doubled down on the comment and other similar ones after being released by police, insisting that the posts “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 wrote on X.

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

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

Police said that the State Attorney’s Office approved their opening of an investigation ahead of the interrogation.

Frey, a staunch leftist who holds fast to his ultra-Orthodox upbringing, has urged Israelis to refuse military service and frequents the anti-government, pro-hostage deal protests that take place weekly on Tel Aviv’s Begin Street outside the Kirya military base.

This is not the first time Frey has been detained by police over online comments. In December 2022, he was questioned for hours regarding his comments praising a West Bank Palestinian who had stabbed a soldier in Tel Aviv.

He said the posts led to his sacking from the anti-Netanyahu outlet Democrat TV in November that year.

Frey has been an outspoken critic of the war in Gaza since its outset. He came under fire from right-wing activists just days into the fighting after recording a video of himself reciting Kaddish, the Jewish mourners’ prayer, for Gazans killed in Israel’s counteroffensive to Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The video triggered angry demonstrations outside his home in Bnei Brak on October 15, 2023, by protesters who reportedly tried to break into the building. Police officers arrived late that night to escort him and his children from the scene.

Frey has also likened the plight of the hostages held by Hamas and other terror group in Gaza to that of Palestinians detained by Israel on security grounds. He frequently posts about Palestinian women and children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.