Detention and removal order

Israeli police held Manuel Tartarotti, 35, and his father Alberto, 67, both from Bolzano, for more than 24 hours on suspicion of terrorism. The two men had been in the West Bank since 18 October for humanitarian reasons, carrying funds raised in Italy for Youth of Sumud, a volunteer group that won the Alex Langer Award in 2024. Both have since been ordered to leave Israel and received a ten-year ban on entering the country. The case became public on Wednesday, 21 October, when the South Tyrolean portal Salto.bz published their account, and Italian outlets followed.

Manuel Tartarotti's account

Manuel told Salto.bz that Israeli police asked for the pair's documents, then blindfolded both men and loaded them into a military van without saying where they were going. He said he was grabbed and beaten in the back of the vehicle. At a detention site the two were interrogated, fingerprinted, had DNA samples taken and were kept handcuffed until late at night. He described a filthy cell where he was at least with his father, which kept them calm.

“I didn't know what was going to happen, and I was afraid.”

Rai places their arrest near Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank and says they were taken to a military base in Hebron for questioning.

The police version and the charges

A statement from the Israeli police, published by The Times of Israel and cited by Salto.bz, says the father and son took part in an unauthorized olive harvest and fled into a military training zone when officers arrived. Tartarotti rejects that account of the charges. He says they were in an area declared illegal although no signs indicated it, and that the main reason was their affiliation with Youth of Sumud, which he says Israel labels a terrorist group, a claim he calls untrue. Rai lists different suspicions, naming illegal entry into a military zone and 'affiliation' with al-Haq, which it says Israel considers terrorist. According to Rai's account of Manuel's view, the aim is to discourage international volunteers who arrive for the olive harvest and send them away for good.

Wider pressure on olive harvest volunteers

Rai reports that about eighty foreigners were roughed up, held for 24 hours on terrorism charges and expelled, with the Tartarotti pair among them. It describes the climate as tense a few days before elections, with settler violence against Palestinians harvesting olives intensifying. The same reporting says the violence also reached journalists, including Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine, who was kicked and robbed. European diplomats, among them the French consul in Jerusalem, were caught up in it too, as was Brad Lander, a Democratic candidate for the US Congress and a critic of the Netanyahu government.