This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Bassem Tamimi (also Bassem al-Tamimi; Arabic: باسم التميمي; born c. 1967)[1] is a Palestinian grassroots activist and an organizer of protests against Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.

[5][6] Tamimi was ten weeks old at the time of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in June 1967 and hid with his mother in a cave during the conflict.

[3] As a grassroots activist, he organized weekly demonstrations to protest the seizure of the village's well by the nearby Israeli settlement of Halamish,[1][7][8] established in 1977.

[8][11] Tamimi is an admirer of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi and believes that armed conflict against a more powerful Israeli opponent will only bring disaster.

[1] Amnesty International designated him a prisoner of conscience, "detained solely for his role in organizing peaceful protests against the encroachment onto Palestinian lands by Israeli settlers," and called for his immediate and unconditional release.

[8] An army prosecutor protested against his release, stating that Tamimi would "most definitely continue to use the status he received because of his arrest to influence young people to throw stones.

[1] Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak described Tamimi's partial exoneration as a "miracle" given the 99.74 percent conviction rate of the military court.

"[19] On 24 October, Tamimi joined 80 other activists, both Palestinian and international, in a protest at a Rami Levy supermarket in the West Bank just north of Jerusalem.

"[3][20][21] Amnesty International again described him as a prisoner of conscience, stating "Once again, Bassem Tamimi is being held solely for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

[23]In 2015, the Anti-Defamation League condemned a post (since deleted) by Tamimi on social media, where he allegedly spread the false myth of the Israel harvesting the organs of Palestinian children.

[26] In the wake of the incident, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett declared that the young women involved "should finish their lives in prison".

[27] On the 29 October 2023, while travelling to visit relatives in Jordan, Tamimi was detained at Allenby Bridge and last heard of when the family was telephoned by an anonymous woman from Silwan from Hadassah hospital where he had been taken after suffering from a dangerous rise in blood pressure.

When Haaretz attempted to publish what it called ‘the Kafkaesque proceedings of judicial review’, the Israeli military censor blacked out a large part of their report.

[29] In 2012, a photograph of his daughter Ahed shaking her fist at an Israeli soldier became internationally famous, and she received the Handala Courage award[30] in Istanbul, meeting Turkey's then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

[31] Bassem's cousin Rushdi Muhammed Sa'id Tamimi was convicted of the October 1993 murder of Haim Mizrahi,[32] a settler from Beit El, and was released in 2013.