A still frame from a hostage video posted online on Thursday by Islamist militants in Gaza who claimed to have kidnapped an Italian citizen, Vittorio Arrigoni.Update | 8:57 p.m. After this post was originally published, a Hamas security official told Reuters and The Associated Press that an Italian peace activist kidnapped in Gaza has been killed. The official said that the Italian activist’s body was found in an abandoned house after midnight local time and two men were arrested. My colleague Fares Akram in Gaza is working to confirm these reports and will have more information soon in his new article.
Original Post | 5:55 p.m. Islamist militants in Gaza threatened to kill a kidnapped Italian peace activist in a chilling hostage video posted online on Thursday.
As Reuters reports, the video shows a blindfolded man who appears to be Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian activist who has worked in support of the Palestinian cause in Gaza for more than two years. A text warning on the video said that the militants would execute their prisoner unless the Hamas government releases imprisoned members of their jihadist movement by 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon.
As The Associated Press explains, “Hamas itself is a fundamentalist Islamic group, but it faces challenges from even more extremist offshoots of Islam,” including the group that abducted Mr. Arrigoni, which claims an affiliation with Al Qaeda.
In a statement on the kidnapping, the International Solidarity Movement, which coordinates the work of activists in Gaza and the West Bank, said that Mr. Arrigoni, “a journalist and human rights defender working in the Gaza Strip, was kidnapped by Salafists, members of a very small extremist group in Gaza.” The group added:
Vittorio has been active in the Palestine cause for almost 10 years. For the past two and a half years, he has been in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement, monitoring human rights violations by Israel, supporting the Palestinian popular resistance against the Israeli occupation and disseminating information about the situation in Gaza to his home country of Italy.
According to a report from the Palestinian news agency Maan:
There was no immediate reaction from the Hamas government which controls Gaza. Its security forces have in recent years taken a hard line against Salafi activists in the enclave, and I.S.M. cofounder Huwaida Arraf said the government was “working hard to secure his release.”
A group of young Palestinian Facebook activists, who call themselves Gaza Youth Breaks Out, demanded Mr. Arrigoni’s immediate release and announced plans for a demonstration in Gaza City’s Jundi square at 4 p.m. on Friday.
On Twitter, where Mr. Arrigoni writes as VikUtopia, the #FreeVittorio hashtag quickly sprang up and the Gazan activists called the militants who kidnapped Mr. Arrigoni “a disgrace for Palestine.”
The salafies group kidnapped #Vittorio is well known in Gaza as Jaljalat and they’re so hated by Gazans. They are a disgrace 4 #Palestine
Gaza Youth Break Out
GazaYBO
A Palestinian blogger who writes as AmoonaE on Twitter, said that Gaza is “fully behind our brother Vittorio who dedicated his life to Palestine. We won’t let you down.” On his feed, Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American activist, posted a link to an article Mr. Arrigoni wrote for the Electronic Intifada Web site in 2010 about the impact of Israeli shelling on a Gazan family.
As the Italian news agency ANSA reported, an annotated version of the hostage video posted on YouTube by one Gazan blogger added the message: “Gazans are sorry for what those bigots did to Vittorio. We are sure he will be free and safe soon.”
