Photo courtesy of WAFA news agency.
The Jerusalem Governorate reported that Israeli forces extended the detention of Rand Halawani, a 20-year-old player from occupied Jerusalem, until next Friday.
Halawani was summoned for questioning at the Talpiot police station in West Jerusalem on Tuesday before being detained by Israeli authorities and brought before a court, which subsequently ordered an extension of her detention, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) denounced the prolonged detention of Halawani.
In a statement, it said Halawani's arrest and that of a former national team player were "not an isolated incident, it is part of a well-documented pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability."
Israel's military also arrested former national football player Natalie Abu Diyeh, a student at Birzeit University, as well as three other young Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, as reported by AFP.
Birzeit University denounced the arrests as part of Israel's "systematic policies targeting Palestinian education and students' right to continue their academic journey."
Bishop Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, to which Natalie Abu Diyeh belonged, called for her release.
"We are deeply shocked and horrified by this news, as well as by the news that her family does not yet know where she has been taken", Haddad said in a statement on Tuesday.
According to the Prisoners Club, the main association for prisoners' rights in the Palestinian territories, 89 Palestinian women are currently in Israeli jails, including three minors and three pregnant women.
The Palestinian Authority-affiliated Prisoners Club announced in late May that more than 9,400 Palestinians were in Israeli jails, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis.
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