- Israeli forces detain US-Palestinian student Sama Safi along with 3 other female students
Israel's arrest of a Palestinian student holding US citizenship is part of a “broader campaign” targeting the Palestinian student movement since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, a Palestinian official told Anadolu on Thursday.
Amani Sarahneh, media officer at the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, said student Sama Safi was recently detained by Israeli forces along with three other female students.
Sarahneh said Safi holds US citizenship and that her family reported she suffers from a health condition.
She added that the students were transferred to Israel's Ofer interrogation center. One of the detainees is a graduate of Birzeit University, while the others are still enrolled there.
According to Sarahneh, Israel has intensified arrests of university students since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.
"The main change is not the arrests themselves, but the level of violations Palestinian detainees are subjected to," she said.
The official noted that many students have been placed under administrative detention or arrested over student activities or what Israeli authorities describe as “incitement” on social media.
Sarahneh said detained students face “harsh conditions during interrogation and imprisonment, including hunger, medical neglect and various forms of abuse.”
She added that the arrests aim to “undermine students' rights to education and freedom of expression,” stressing that Palestinians seek only to ensure students can pursue their education safely.
On Tuesday, the Palestinian Prisoners' Society said Israeli authorities arrested four female students from Birzeit University near Ramallah as part of a wider arrest campaign targeting 35 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank.
The group said the number of Palestinian women held in Israeli prisons has risen to 90, including three minors, three pregnant women, 19 administrative detainees, and two prisoners diagnosed with cancer.
It added that more than 760 Palestinian women have been arrested since the start of the Gaza war and that female prisoners face harsh detention conditions, including hunger, medical neglect, solitary confinement, and repeated abuse.
Israeli arrests have sharply escalated across the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the war, with official Palestinian figures indicating that around 23,000 Palestinians have been detained during that period.