STRASBOURG, Aug 7: The Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly president, Rene van der Linden, slammed on Monday Israel’s arrest of the Speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, Aziz Dweik, and called for his immediate release.

“All legitimately elected parliamentarians enjoy parliamentary immunity unless and until they are divested of it by their own parliaments,” van den Linden said.

“It is therefore totally unacceptable to now detain the duly appointed speaker... as it was unacceptable to detain 20 other Palestinian lawmakers and eight members of the government of the Palestinian Authority on June 29,” he said. “I call for their immediate release.”

The Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, which includes the lawmakers from Israel and the Palestinian territories, also condemned Dweik’s arrest in a statement issued from its office in Tunis.

It said the action ‘is an attack on the democratic values expressed by the Palestinian people’ and called for Dweik’s immediate release.

Tunisia is the current chair of the Euro-Mediterranean body, which groups 240 members of parliament from southern Europe and other countries in the Mediterranean basin.

Israeli troops detained Dweik, 58, at his home in Ramallah during a military incursion in the West Bank city late on Saturday.

“We arrested him because he is a leader of Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation,” an Israeli army spokesman said.

—AFP