Sara had just finished breaking the Ramadan fast one evening last week and was preparing sweets for her four kids in honor of the holy month when she heard a knock.

At the door of the 40-year-old teacher’s Wadi Ara home were cops. A lot of them.

“Suddenly a ton of police came into my house, around a dozen of them,” recalled Sara, who preferred to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons.

What had brought police to her home that Wednesday evening was a Facebook post in which she is seen posing with her two eldest children while holding a Palestinian flag.

She had posted it in 2016.

“‘Bring the flag,’ they demanded,” Sara recalled to The Times of Israel. “I explained to them that the photo is very old, but they told me that if I didn’t find the flag, they would conduct a search and ‘turn my house upside down.’”

Sara searched through her home and eventually found the flag in a closet. When she brought it out, cops cuffed her hands and feet and put her under arrest for incitement.

With Israel again at war, heightening security concerns nationwide, there are indications that police have also stepped up efforts to crack down on what they view as inciting speech, targeting and arresting Arab citizens of Israel on what appear to be flimsy legal grounds.

Lawyers say the campaign, seemingly egged on by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, is meant to curb the minority’s right to free speech and scare them into silence under the guise of wartime security.

While authorities have not published official figures, the National Security Ministry says it has “dealt firmly” with at least 10 incidents of incitement, though not all resulted in arrests. It also published a graphic claiming “dozens of arrests” for incitement, terror financing, thwarted terror attacks and more.

Lawyers and activists say that since the start of the war on February 28, at least four Arab Israelis have been arrested on incitement suspicions under Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Law. No charges have been filed in any of the cases. Police say another 22 West Bank Palestinians were arrested on incitement suspicions as of Sunday.

Sara said after being cuffed, cops hauled her to a police station, the first time she had ever been in one, and interrogators subjected her to what she deemed a “humiliation ritual.”

“They tried to force me to stomp on a Palestinian flag, took photos of me in front of an Israeli flag with their phones,” she recalled.

Police did not respond to a request for comment about any of her claims or whether they plan to file an indictment against her. She spoke to The Times of Israel using her son’s phone, since her phone was still held by police amid the continuing investigation.

In a statement the next day, police announced her arrest and issued a warning to others in a media statement.

“Especially in these times, on the backdrop of war and Operation ‘Roaring Lion’, the police will act with determination and zero tolerance toward every expression of hostile actors or publications that are liable to incite or disturb public order,” they wrote, attaching a picture of the flag.

The statement echoed rhetoric by Ben Gvir, who has made the campaign against incitement a centerpiece amid the war.

On March 1, just the second day of the joint Israeli-US offensive in Iran, the minister visited a half-collapsed apartment complex in Tel Aviv that had been hit by an Iranian missile, where a woman had been killed the night before.

“Whoever raises his head to try to incite against the State of Israel… we will thrash him, we will tear his head off,” Ben Gvir told reporters at the scene, backdropped by police officers and the blast site.

The night before, police had arrested a man near the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City on suspicion of having expressed “support for the enemy, terror and war” at a gas station west of the capital, according to a vague statement by law enforcement. The suspect, who has not been named, was not charged. It remains unclear what his specific comments were.

According to a Thursday statement from the National Security Ministry, authorities were ramping up enforcement against perceived incitement and support for Iran, and forces — including police and Border Police officers– were being concentrated around mosques in mixed cities.

Hagar Shechter, an attorney with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said the crackdown mirrors the police’s behavior toward Arab citizens in previous wars. “The police are making unlawful use of their powers to restrict the Arab public’s freedom of expression, while denying freedom of speech and shrinking the democratic space,” she said, calling it yet “another aspect of the severe discrimination suffered by the Arab public” in Israel.

While Israeli Jews appear to overwhelmingly support the decision to go to war, polling by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that only around a quarter of Arabs do.

While there have been few public protests against the war, one that took place in Tel Aviv on March 3 was quickly shut down by police, who dispersed some 20 activists — mostly Israeli Jews — and arrested at least one attendee, confiscating signs condemning Israel’s military actions.

Police cited the Home Front Command’s wartime restrictions, which at the time prohibited gatherings of over 10 people, as the reason for dispersing the small protest with such force. But many accused police of a double standard, noting the large Purim gatherings in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak taking place the same day.

The detained activist, 19-year-old Itamar Greenberg, was arrested on suspicion of disturbing public order and obstructing a police officer. He recounted being brought to a nearby police station and subjected to a strip search, which he said was both unlawful and humiliating.

“Police told me to take off my underwear, turn around and bend over… I told them that this was an illegal search. They replied that if I didn’t do it myself, then an officer would do it by force, and that I can’t tell them what is or isn’t illegal,” he told The Times of Israel.

Article 24 of the Counter-Terror Law prohibits identifying with a terrorist organization and incitement to terrorism. According to what little information about the cases in the last week is available, some of them have concerned perceived support for Iran, while others, like that of Sara, seem to bear no relation.

“This arrest, for having the Palestinian flag, means that any person who wants to be part of the Palestinian collective is a suspect. We’re seeing a return of this doctrine of the ‘enemy from within,’” said Hadeel Abu Salah, Sara’s defense attorney, who works for the Adalah organization.

According to Abu Salah, police did not manage to get permission from the state prosecution to investigate Sara for terror offenses, and the decade-old Facebook post would likely have been too scant of evidence for Article 24.

Instead, police arrested her on suspicion of disrupting public order, an offense that allows officers to arrest individuals on the spot without the launch of a formal, criminal investigation. Police later released her to seven-day house arrest without bringing her before a judge.

Abu Salah said this particular police tactic creates a “general feeling that people are being monitored all the time,” calling it a “tool in order to convey a message of ongoing censorship of the Arab community.”

The most high-profile case so far concerns Majd Asadi, an opera singer from the Druze town of Daliyat al-Karmel, who was arrested on March 2 after posting that he had “many disagreements” with Iran’s late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, but shared “enormous appreciation for his uncompromising stance against the imperial forces of evil.”

Police said Asadi was suspected of identifying with a terrorist organization and incitement to terrorism.

After two days of being held in a prison wing for terror convicts, he was freed by the Haifa Magistrate’s Court. As a condition for his release, the court forbade him from posting anything about the war with Iran for a five-day period and imposed a NIS 2,000 ($650) fine.

The post and its aftermath sparked a wave of online anger, and eventually reached Rafik Halabi, Daliyat al-Karmel’s council head, who said he intended to expel Asadi, an Arab Muslim, from the village, in a seeming attempt to distance himself from the case.

According to Abu Salah, efforts to stifle Arab political expression initially stepped up in the aftermath of the Hamas-led October 7 massacre. She tallied 480 incitement arrests since then, resulting in 200 indictments.

In the seven years prior to the attack, there had been 80 indictments filed under Article 24, according to Adalah.

Police began arresting people for speech that “would ordinarily fall well within the bounds of protected expression,” she said. “Statements on social media, expressions of grief, and political criticism have all become grounds for interrogation, detention or prosecution.”

These developments have had “a chilling effect on public discourse” and raised “serious concerns about the state of civil liberties and democratic space” in Israel, she said.

Sara believes her post was brought to the authorities’ attention after she asked in a Facebook group for help taking care of her 5-year-old autistic son, who has been struggling at home without school, amid the regular blare of air raid sirens.

Someone in that group apparently clicked on her account and saw that amid her many posts about vegetarianism and animal welfare, she had also uploaded a photo of her holding a Palestinian flag at the ruins of Aqqur, a Palestinian village which was razed during the 1948 War of Independence, and where her grandfather had lived.

Sara fought back tears as she recounted being subject to harassment in the lead-up to her arrest. Users called for her to be deported to Gaza, Syria or Lebanon, and a small protest was organized outside her house after her account was “exposed” by several disgruntled Harish residents.

During her interrogation, Sara stressed to police that she has no problem with Israelis. She noted that she teaches both Arab and Jewish children at a bilingual school, part of the Hand in Hand educational network.

“I don’t feel like I identify with the Israeli flag in a national sense, but it’s also the flag of the state I am a citizen of, I respect it,” she recounted telling officers.

Nevertheless, she claimed, police struck the interrogation transcript from her case file, so it appeared as if she did not respond to officers’ line of questioning.

“I tried to tell them that just because I identify with the Palestinian flag,” she said, “it doesn’t mean I hate Israel.”

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