Who is the Christian Palestinian Woman being held on unknown charges?
It was early April, around 4 a.m. one morning, when Israeli soldiers banged on the door of a Palestinian home in Birzeit, a city near Ramallah, rushed into the house and told Layan Nasir to get ready—she was coming with them.
Bound and gagged, Nasir, 24, was taken to a holding center and later transferred to an Israeli jail. In late July, Israel extended Nasir’s four-month detention by another four months.
“The family are absolutely devastated. Our church, all of us, are devastated for the extension of her time of detention, and we’re powerless to do anything about it,” said Rev. Richard Sewell, dean of St George’s College in Jerusalem.
Only Nasir’s lawyer can visit her and even the lawyer doesn’t know the charges against her, which is common practice in Israel under this type of arrest.
“Since the war started, Israel has withdrawn all rights to family visits. They’re doing that as a way of punishing all Palestinians because of the hostages in Gaza who do not have a right to family visits,” Sewell said.
Nasir’s case is a rare example of a Christian Palestinian—let alone a female Christian Palestinian—being detained by Israel.
The Anglican Church, to which Nasir’s family belongs, is operating an international campaign to bring awareness to her plight. The case also forces a spotlight on the 3,500 Palestinian prisoners being held under Israel’s controversial detention policies.
“Unfortunately, Israel does detain and imprison people for no good reason. There are multiple examples of that,” Sewell charged.
Israel’s policy of “administrative detention” allows it to arrest suspects and hold them without trial and without known charges. Israeli authorities can renew administrative detentions indefinitely. According to HaMoked, administrative detainees in Israel spend a year in detention on average.
Israel says this practice is necessary for security reasons. But Palestinians and rights groups allege that the system denies due process and is widely abused.
So what was it about Nasir that attracted the attention of Israeli security forces, again?
Little is known conclusively about her case. Israeli officials told Sky News that Nasir was arrested “in view of intelligence information regarding the danger she poses to the security of the area” and that she “resisted arrest and confronted the forces.”
Sewell said that Nasir is not a known political activist. But this is her second arrest. On July 7, 2021, Layan was detained at her house over her participation in student activities organized by the Progressive Democratic Students Pole, a student group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), at Birzeit University.
Israeli authorities banned the student group in 2020 and consider it a terrorist organization.
Sewell characterized her participation as “pastoral care”—advocating for other students who may have encountered trouble with Israel’s security forces.
“This, I gather, happens quite routinely, that people who are potential community leaders are incarcerated as a way of silencing them and a way of intimidating them and ensuring that they don’t cause any problem, any further problems to the occupying powers. And if she had done anything that really was noteworthy, well, charge her,” Sewell said.
“Tell us what it is that is supposedly so subversive and so dangerous that she should need to be incarcerated and have done with it,” he continued. “Then there can be no disagreement, can there? There is just no justification for administrative detention in cases like this.”
Nasir is believed to be the only Christian Palestinian woman currently in Israeli detention. Her arrest has galvanized the local Anglican Christian community and has raised awareness all the way up the ranks to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby who called her detainment an “egregious state of affairs.”
“I ask the Israeli Government to look again at her case and that she be released,” the archbishop said in a statement. “The widespread and routine manner in which Israel uses administrative detention of Palestinians as an instrument of Occupation is deeply discriminatory. It cannot be legally or morally justified.”
The extension of Nasir’s detention, however, was lost in the headlines. Late last month, 9 Israeli soldiers were arrested on charges of abuse of Palestinian prisoners, including suspected sodomy of one of the prisoners.
The arrest sparked protests involving right-wing Knesset members and pulled back the curtain on deep divisions within Israeli society. In fact, one commentator called it the Kingdom of Israel vs the Kingdom of Judah reincarnate.
The detention facility in question is Sde Teiman, which has been called “the Israeli Guantanamo.” Around 4,000 Palestinians have been brought there from Gaza since war began in October. In response to a New York Times investigation about the site a few months ago, the Israel Defense Forces denied that “systematic abuse” had taken place there and even called some of the allegations “completely unfounded.”
But late July, when Israeli military police arrived at the facility to arrest the soldiers suspected of serious sexual abuse, they were met with resistance by some soldiers and later, protestors including far-right Knesset members.
The issue has divided the nation. Far-right members of the governing coalition in Israel are asking why the country is even dealing with such a debate right now. Knesset Member Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionism party and the head of the Law Constitution and Justice committee asked the interviewer on Kan radio last week, “Why at 7 a.m. do we have to deal with whether or not a Nukba terrorist was violated while there are still 115 Israeli hostages in Gaza?”
Other lawmakers defended the military police decision to arrest the officers while others. Knesset Member Gilad Kariv, if the left-wing Labor party, said that if Israel is a nation of laws and that the army is obliged to investigate violations of the laws of war. The army’s top lawyer, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, argued that investigations into suspected soldiers’ wrongdoing highlights the morality of and strengthens the military, not weakening it as many on the right claim.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and other groups have petitioned the high court to shut down Sde Teiman due to alleged human rights abuses against Palestinian terror suspects.
Amid these allegations and the civil debate, Nasir’s case has received scant attention and probably won’t find its way to the headlines any time soon.