“The police are looking for you,” her father said.

Listen to this article, read by Rasha Zamamiri

Five cruisers had come to Rita Murad’s family home. It was a two-story building of unpainted concrete, set on a tightly packed street in Nazareth, one of the largest Arab cities in Israel. The officers said they were here for Murad, who was 21.

That day, Oct. 29 of last year, Murad was not at the house. She didn’t even live at that address. Since leaving Nazareth to go to college in Haifa, she had rented an apartment near campus. Murad seemed like an average Israeli college student, favoring gold chains, crop tops, late nights and Marlboros, though when it came to academics, she stood out; she had always been at the top of her high school class. Besides Arabic and Hebrew, she spoke English with only a trace of an accent, a skill she perfected during a junior-year study-abroad program at a high school in Vermont.

Murad knew that she would have to turn herself in, so she packed a bag and went back to Nazareth, where her father drove her to the city’s main police station. Raising his two daughters alone after the death of his wife in a car accident, Saleem Murad worried that any trouble with the law could derail Rita’s studies. When he was younger, he enrolled at the same college, the Technion, with aspirations similar to his daughter’s. But he ran out of money and finished his degree elsewhere. He dropped his daughter at the blue gate of the station.

An officer took Murad into an interview room. He was Arab, like her, but there was no rapport between them; his face conveyed skepticism, then anger. They sat across from each other at a simple wooden table. The officer explained that Murad was being investigated for terrorism. He put his hand on the computer monitor in front of him and began to turn it toward her.

Murad could already guess what the monitor would display. For the past few weeks, friends had been texting her, warning that a handful of her private Instagram stories, which she shared on the day of the Hamas attack, were being passed among Jewish students at the university. She thought that someone must have shown them to the police. She didn’t know who.

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