PFLP terrorists (illustration)
PFLP terrorists (illustration)Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash 90

IDF troops on Thursday arrested Khalida Jarrar, an MP on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), for posing "substantial
security risks," a military spokeswoman told AFP.

Jarrar is a senior member of the Socialist Palestinian Arab terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Last August, she was served an order banning her from her home in the Palestinian Authority (PA) stronghold of Ramallah in Samaria, sending her to Jericho to the east of Jerusalem not far from the Dead Sea.

She said at the time that she would disobey the order. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Prisoners' Club said she was arrested at her home in breach of the order.

PFLP, founded by Dr. George Habash, used to specialize in plane hijackings. It's most infamous attack was the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane, diverting the flight to Entebbe, Uganda. The passengers were later rescued in a daring and famous IDF raid, in which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's brother Yonatan Netanyahu was killed while commanding the elite operation.

Commenting on the arrest, Senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official Hanan Ashrawi claimed the move was for "political" rather than security reasons.

"It is obvious that her arrest is politically motivated and a violation of her parliamentary immunity, and Israel should respect international norms regarding the immunity of elected officials," said Ashrawi, a member of the executive committee of the PLO, a terrorist organization that had its international recognition as such lifted in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

PLO leadership says 18 of 130 Palestinian Arab MPs are currently in Israeli detention.

But the Prisoners' Club said Jarrar was the 16th to be arrested, showing faulty counting on the side of one of the parties.

The Palestinian parliament has not met since 2007, after elections a year earlier won by the Islamist terrorist movement Hamas.