Bella Hadid criticises Instagram for removing post of father's Palestinian passport picture

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Bella Hadid has criticised Instagram for removing a post featuring a photograph of the inside of her father’s passport.

On Tuesday, the model shared an Instagram story with her 31.4m followers that showed Mohammed Hadid’s passport photo alongside the caption: “I am proud to be Palestinian”.

Hadid added: “Everyone should post where their mother and fathers were born today! Remind them how proud you are of where you come from!”

The model later added another Instagram Story in which she revealed that her previous Story had been taken down because it went against the platform’s community guidelines.

“A message from me to @instagram,” she wrote alongside a screenshot of the message from Instagram.

“Instagram removed my story that only said ‘My baba and his birthplace of Palestine’ with a photo of his American passport.

“@instagram exactly what part of me being proud of my fathers birth place of Palestine is ‘bullying, harassment, graphic, or sexual nudity’?” she added.

“Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram?”

Hadid went on to accuse the platform of “bullying”.

“You can’t erase history by silencing people. It doesn’t work like that,” she continued.

The supermodel also shared the message on Twitter and was inundated with support from her fans.

“We are sick of having Palestinian content censored on social media platforms,” one person wrote.

Another added: “What part of telling people your ethnicity counts as ‘hate speech’?”

Hadid re-shared her post, which remains on her Story at the time of writing.

A Facebook spokesperson said: ”To protect the privacy of our community, we don’t allow people to post personal information, such as passport numbers, on Instagram,” a spokesperson said.

“In this case, the passport number was blurred out, so this content shouldn’t have been removed. ‘We’ve restored the content and apologised to Bella for the mistake.”