Israel Releases Mays Abu Ghosh, Palestinian Student Jailed for Membership in Leftist Campus Group

A Palestinian journalism student imprisoned by Israeli security forces for joining a banned leftist campus group was released Monday after 15 months behind bars.

Palestine Chronicle reports 23-year-old Mays Abu Ghosh of the Qalandiya refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank was taken from Damon Prison to the Israeli military checkpoint at Jalameh, where she was released into the arms of waiting relatives and other former female prisoners of the occupation forces.

Abu Ghosh, who studied at Birzeit University, was arrested in August 2019 and charged with being a member of the Democratic Progressive Student Pole, the campus arm of the Marxist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second-largest Palestine Liberation Organization faction after Fatah. 

Democratic Progressive Student Pole is banned by Israeli occupation forces as a "terrorist organization," which critics say is a dubious designation divorced from the reality of the group's nonviolent collegiate activities. 

According to the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, such "arbitrary designations may be issued at any time by an Israeli military commander of occupation forces in the West Bank, and are used as a pretext to round up, detain, and violently attack Palestinian organizations and movements."

"Almost all Palestinian political parties are similarly labeled by the Israeli occupation," the group added.