Khalida Jarrar

Khalida Jarrar (; born 9 February 1963) is a Palestinian politician. She is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and has continued to serve as an elected representative ever since. She is also the Palestinian representative on the Council of Europe and is currently head of the Prisoners Committee of the PLC. She played a major role in Palestine's application to join the International Criminal Court. The court sentenced her to 15 months in prison, of which she served 6, before being released after an international campaign on her behalf.

In March 2021, after having been held without charge since 2019, she was sentenced by an Israeli military court to two years in prison after a plea bargain, in which she declared herself guilty of membership in an organization, the PFLP, which Israel regards as a terrorist group. She went on record to state that her plea bargaining was due to the exhaustingly protracted nature of legal proceedings, lack of faith in Israel's military courts, and the threat of a 7-year sentence. She was rearrested in December 2023, following the outbreak of the Gaza war, and released in January 2025 as part of the 2025 Gaza war ceasefire.

Family Jarrar's father ran a toy-shop business in Nablus. and a son, Wadia. The couple live in al-Bireh, Ramallah. In her six years of imprisonment, she has been refused leave to attend her father's funeral (2015), that of her mother (2018), and of her daughter Suha (2021) who died aged 31. On Suha's death from cardiac arrest in July 2021, Jarrar was denied a temporary release from her imprisonment on humanitarian grounds in order to attend her daughter's funeral. Her son Wadia died in 2024, aged 29, also of a heart attack while she was again under administrative detention. She has been active for a number of years in support of Palestinian prisoners, and she served as the director of Addameer, a prisoners' support and human rights NGO in Ramallah, from 1993 to 2005 and remains a board member. She has also previously worked with UNRWA and has been prominently active in working with Palestinian women and advocating for women's rights.

Since 1998 Jarrar has been banned from traveling outside of the occupied Palestinian territories, after she attended the Human Rights Defenders' Summit in Paris that year. Since March 2006, she has been the PFLP's senior political leader, after the group's Secretary General Ahmad Sa'adat was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. In July 2010, Jarrar was informed by a doctor that tests indicated she needed an urgent brain scan to establish an exact neurological diagnosis. Since the medical equipment to make the diagnosis was not available in the West Bank, where she was then detained, she was informed that the PNA's Health Ministry would cover the costs of her hospitalization in Amman, but not in Israel. As a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, expatriation for medical tests should, she was assured, could be arranged. An Israeli official for the Civil Administration of the West Bank said there was no security threat were she to be treated in Jordan. On August 29, she was denied transit to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, and Shin Bet stated that she was a security threat to the region. Subsequently, she was allowed, later that year, to travel to Amman for treatment.

Jarrar made an appeal against the decision to an Israeli court, which reduced the restriction period from 6 to 1 month. But Jarrar actually never left Ramallah. According to a left-wing columnist of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, her refusal to be deported lead to her arrest in April 2015.

Administrative detention, trial and conviction

On 2 April 2015, at around 1:15 a.m., Jarrar was arrested at her home by Israeli soldiers. Her husband says that a unit of 50–60 soldiers smashed the front gate and broke into the house, but otherwise did not act violently. Two computers and a mobile phone were confiscated. where it was confirmed, despite international protests. Her detention without trial was condemned by Israel's Haaretz newspaper, which argued that Israel at times adopts the procedure excessively. Though international humanitarian law does accept administrative detention in exceptional cases and only as a last resort, human rights groups argue that Israel, which claims the detentions thwart militant attacks, exceeds the limits by its extensive recourse to the practice.

Israel's Palestinian Arab MK’s, including Ahmad Tibi, called for her immediate release, and Aida Touma-Suleiman called it 'a political detention of an elected official who is opposed to the occupation.' A Palestinian prisoner advocate who tracks the welfare of Palestinian prisoners, Kaddoura Fares, said the timing of the arrest aroused suspicions that Israel's measure against Jarrar was motivated by vindictiveness, given her role in monitoring International Criminal Court (ICC) procedures, and the fact that the order for her detention was implemented immediately after the Palestinian National Authority was accepted as a member of the ICC and was arrested just after the Palestinian Authority joined the ICC. 58 Members of the European Parliament protested her arrest in an open letter to Federica Mogherini, stating that attempts to forcibly transfer a person under occupation, to which she was subject in August 2014, constituted a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Several counts refer to her having given interviews, speeches and lectures, participating in marches and a politicized book fair, calling for Palestinian prisoners to be released, and opposing the Israeli occupation.

Haaretz has called the trials "a Kafkaesque perversion of military law". A date of 29 April was set for a judicial review of the charges, She was the only female detained under Israel's administrative detention policy, The prosecution then appealed the decision to release her on bail, and the court reversed the ruling on May 28, stating Jarrar was a "security risk" on the basis of secret evidence, according to Addameer The court ordered that she be held in detention until proceedings against her have concluded. Her trial was scheduled for June 22. If convicted she faced a prison term of up to 2 years.

By November 2015, Jarrar was still under arrest, in what her attorney called "a circus, a charade". Witnesses who had been asked to identify Jarrar had been presented with pictures of 7 people, where only one person, Ms. Jarrar, was female.

On December 6, 2015, Jarrar received a 15-month jail sentence for belonging to an illegal organization and "incitement", with a suspended sentence of a year within a five-year period. She was also fined $2,582, and released on June 3, 2016.

On 2 July 2017, Jarrar was again detained by the Israeli security apparatus for an alleged offense related to national security.

In June 2018, her detention was extended for another four months, while any info about charges against her remains confidential, which was again renewed until 28 February 2019. She was being held in Damon Prison.

She was released on 28 February 2019, after 20 months in administrative detention without any charge or trial made against her.

In late October 2019, she was again arrested, as 70 Israeli soldiers surrounded her house in Ramallah at 03.00 AM. According to Israeli military sources, she was arrested "in suspicion of being involved in activities which jeopardize the security in the area"; the indictment reads, "...holding a position in an illegal association." The Israeli Military court sentenced her to further administrative detention. Jarrar was subsequently convicted as part of a plea bargain, began serving two years in prison in March, 2021, and was released after finishing her sentence in September of that year. without informing her family; still requiring medication, she was incarcerated in a windowless cell measuring 2.5 x 1.5 meters at Neve Tirza and was kept in solitary confinement. On 24 June, her six-month administrative detention order was renewed.