12 January 2010
A Czech pro-Palestinian activist returned to Prague on Tuesday after she was expelled from Israel, officials said.
Israel Defense Forces soldiers and immigration police detained Eva Novakova, 28, in a raid on her home in Ramallah in the West Bank on early Monday, said the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group where she worked before her expulsion.
The group said in a statement posted on its website that Novakova became its media coordinator three weeks earlier.
The activist was expelled for “breaching the rules of her stay,” the spokesman for the Czech Republic’s Foreign Ministry, Milan Repka, said. He said that Novakova overstayed her visa.
Novakova’s lawyer, Omer Shatz, called the Israeli action against his client politically-motivated.
“This arrest is part of the continued and illegal use of the immigration police against activists, for political purposes,” the statement by the pro-Palestinian group cited him as saying.