Mahmoud MUNA

Image Credit: Alamy

Writer and bookseller Mahmoud Muna was arrested, along with his nephew Ahmad Muna, during a raid by Israeli police on their bookstore in East Jerusalem on 9 February 2025. Plain-clothed police officers stormed the bookstores and confiscated about 250 books on ‘suspicion of inciting terrorism against Israel.’ During the raid, officers used Google Translate to search through the books’ titles, and seized books based on their cover designs, colours, or titles that contained ‘Palestine,’ ‘Palestinian,’ or ‘Gaza.’  

The two men faced accusations of ‘incitement’ and ‘disturbing public order’; however, police failed to provide evidence to support the accusations. Following two days in detention, they were both released on bail without charge, placed under house arrest for five days, and ordered not to appear at their bookstore for 20 days.   

About a month later, on 11 March, Israeli officers raided the bookstore again without a search warrant and confiscated about 50 books, including titles on the work of British artist Banksy, and others by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé and the US academic Noam Chomsky. Muna’s brother Imad, the co-owner of the shop, was arrested and taken for interrogation by the police. He was later released without charge on the same day and most books were returned. 

Mahmoud Muna, born in 1982, is a writer and a bookseller who runs Jerusalem’s renowned Educational Bookshop and The Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel which holds a prominent position in the city’s literary scene. He is the co-editor of Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, published by Saqi Books a week before the first raid on the bookstore. Muna has been active in many cultural initiatives across Palestine and writes regularly on culture and politics for various media outlets, including Haaretz and The Independent, with bylines in the London Review of Books and Jerusalem Quarterly, among others.