By Staff Writer
14:12:2021
Prominent Palestinian Cleric Sheikh Raed Salah was on Sunday released after spending 17 months in prison on trumped-up charges of incitement to terrorism.

Salah, an influential cleric and the head of the now-banned Northern Islamic Movement, has to date spent over seven stints in Israeli prisons and was even placed under house arrest for three years over his religious sermons and activism. His latest imprisonment was related to his opposition to installing metal detectors at the Al-Aqsa Masjid Compound.

His sermons were deemed incitement, even though these were more an attempt to silence him, and more significantly, the Qur’an and Hadith, which he cited.

According to his lawyers, in an unsuccessful attempt to break his spirit, Sheikh Salah spent all 17 months in solitary confinement and was not allowed to speak to others, something unusual for even the Israeli prison system.

In September, a call was made to release him; however, this was unsuccessful.

Sheikh Salah remains wildly popular, with hundreds of citizens and activists welcoming him at his home in the Palestinian village of Umm Al Fahm. Referring to his imprisonment, Sheikh Salah maintained that “The charges are religious and political pursuits… All I have ever endeavoured to say to the Muslim world, the Arab world, and the Palestinian people, is that our cause is one, embodied by Jerusalem and by al-Aqsa Mosque.”