Ezra Nawi, a Jewish radical left-wing activist who campaigns for Palestinian rights, has been secretly recorded boasting of turning Palestinian real-estate dealers who sell land to Jews over to the PA, which tortures and kills them.
Nawi’s radical leftist circle was infiltrated by right-wing activists, who clandestinely recorded Nawi discussing how he takes the names of Palestinians willing to sell land to Jews and gives them to the PA. “Straightaway I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force,” Nawi said in the recording, after which the PA “catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”
In the Palestinian Authority, anyone convicted of selling land to Jews is subject to capital punishment.
According to the Israeli television program “Uvda”, which aired the investigative piece on Thursday, an activist with the left-wing human rights group B’Tzelem set up a sting operation with Nawi to catch and turn in a Palestinian seller who believed he was meeting with a Jew interested in purchasing land.
Nawi was recorded obtaining information from the Palestinian and saying that he intended to give the information to the PA.
In a statement on Facebook, B’Tzelem responded to the report by saying that while it opposed torture and executions, reporting Palestinians willing to sell land to Jews was “the only legitimate course of action.”
Left-wing radical Nawi, who was born in Jerusalem to Jewish parents from Iraq, speaks Arabic fluently and is mostly active in the southern Har Hebron region of Judea. He has been arrested several times in the past, once for assaulting police officers.
In the early 1990’s, he served half a year in prison for statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy, and in 2009 evidence in a legal case with which Nawi was involved revealed that security forces believe he is a supporter of Hamas.
In response to the story, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on Facebook that the report “unmasked radicals among us, whose hatred for settlements has pushed them over the edge to the point of delivering innocents for torture and execution.”