Biden must do more to free Israeli-held US grandmother, rights group says

An influential Arab-American group sought to increase pressure on Monday on the Joe Biden White House to use its influence with Israel to help free a US-Palestinian grandmother detained by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank.

Samaher Esmail’s family also alleges that she has been beaten and denied access to medical attention.

At a briefing in Washington DC, Robert McCaw of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the detention of Esmail – one of three US citizens recently arrested by the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza – had shown that being an American was “no protection from Israel’s discriminatory, abusive and violent targeting of Palestinians”.

According to a lawyer who visited Esmail last week, the 46-year-old grandmother was covered in bruises along her wrists, arms and back. She was also only semi-coherent.

“The American government needs to do more to protect Palestinians, especially Palestinian Americans, from Israel’s government, and they should start now by securing the release of Samaher and all other Palestinian American prisoners,” McCaw said at Monday’s briefing.

Esmail’s sons Suliman and Ibrahim Hamed urged the US government to do more to demand their mother’s release from Israeli detention and return her home to the US for medical treatment.

They said if she was guilty of anything, it was of being a Palestinian American woman “who dares to demand justice and express her opinion”, Suliman Hamed said. “My mom was viciously beaten and taken into unlawful custody by the Israel forces from the West Bank.”

Esmail was detained in a dawn raid in early February in the village of Silwad, according to accounts from family members. It was part of a sweep of military arrests that advocates say