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Twenty-four years ago, while in charge of a small television operation at Al Quds University, my team and I decided to broadcast live sessions of the Palestinian Legislative Council dealing with corruption in the newly established Palestinian Authority. The broadcast angered people in Yasser Arafat’s entourage and I was arrested and jailed for seven days without any explanation.
I recall that event after Nizar Banat, a popular and vocal critic of President Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, was arrested on Thursday by Palestinian security forces and died after a few hours in custody. Banat’s relatives say he was brutally beaten. The police had stormed into a home in Hebron to find Banat, who had been in hiding there, hoping it would be safe from the security forces when his own home was sprayed with warning shots after he criticized Abbas’ April 29 decision to postpone the legislative elections. Those elections would have been the first since 2006.