Palestine ruling party’s Facebook page closed

RAMALLAH: The official Facebook page of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) ruling party Fatah has been shut down by the social media giant.

Munir al-Jaghoub, a Fatah official and the “administrator” of the page, said Facebook closed Fatah’s official page after the group posted a photo of late Palestinian president and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat, alongside current deputy chairperson of the movement Mahmoud al-Aloul.

Arafat appears in the photo handing a rifle to al-Aloul.

According to a Fatah statement, the rifle belonged to Israeli soldiers, and was captured by Fatah militants in southern Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanon war.

Monday’s shutting down was the second time that the Fatah movement’s official Facebook page had been shut down. In recent months, Israel has detained scores of Palestinians for social media activity, alleging that a wave of unrest that swept the occupied Palestinian territory in October 2015 was encouraged largely by online “incitement”.

In September, Facebook agreed to work with Israel to “minimise online anti-Semitic incitement” after pressure on the social media site to co-ordinate to remove content considered to promote “terrorism”.

Israel had previously blamed Facebook for the perceived proliferation of incitement, with Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan reportedly saying that Facebook chairperson and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had “blood on his hands” for not adequately co-operating with Israel to remove content.

Earlier this year, the controversial “Facebook bill” passed the first reading in the Knesset, allowing Israeli officials to force Facebook to remove certain content through a court order if there are suspicions of “incitement”.

Meanwhile, Palestinians have instead pointed chiefly to the frustration and despair brought on by Israel’s nearly 50-year military occupation of the Palestinian territory and the absence of a political horizon as reasons for the outbreak of violence.