Freed Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi on Sunday called for ending Israel’s decades-long occupation.
“We will continue the resistance to achieve the freedom of the Palestinian people,” al-Tamimi told a press conference in the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah.
“We must boycott and isolate the [Israeli] occupation and put it on trial,” she said.
The 17-year-old girl, who has become an icon of Palestinian resistance, was released along with her mother from Israeli prison on Sunday after an 8-month detention.
Al-Tamimi has dominated world headlines after a video emerged of her slapping an Israeli soldier during a raid on her home to arrest her brother.
She was arrested by Israeli forces in December with an Israeli court slapping her with an 8-month detention in March for “attacking” an Israeli soldier.
In 2012, Istanbul’s Basaksehir Municipality granted al-Tamimi the prestigious Hanzala Courage Award for defying Israeli soldiers who had just arrested her brother.
Images shared in Palestinian media showed a teary-eyed Tamimi, with her thick mane of strawberry-blonde curls, embracing her mother after being released
The teenager has been touted by Palestinians as a symbol of resistance to Israel’s military occupation while many Israelis accuse her of being an agitator seeking to provoke soldiers on camera.
Her case sparked an outpouring of international criticism against Israel and a renewed focus on the treatment of Palestinian youths in Israeli military courts.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday called Tamimi “a model of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, independence and statehood,” according to Wafa, the official PA news agency.
Abbas said that the teenager is a “vital weapon” in nonviolent resistance to Israel’s control over the West Bank.
