A 16-year-old Palestinian girl will face assault charges in an Israeli military court, after a video of her slapping an Israeli soldier went viral. Ahed Tamimi slapped the Israeli soldier two weeks ago, after Israeli troops shot her 14-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet and fired tear gas canisters into her family’s home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. While the video of Tamimi slapping the soldier has gone viral, Mondoweiss reports that the soldier actually slapped the 16-year-old girl first, causing her to slap back. This is Tamimi’s father, activist Bassem Tamimi.

Bassem Tamimi: “The other issue is the support of people and a nation who saw through the slap of Ahed as a morale. They saw their own will, their aspiration, their desire, in this second, to slap the occupation. It expressed the spirits of the Arabic, Palestinian and human street, who desire at some point to erupt against the reality of injustice in a moment of being broken.”