Israeli soldiers arrested Mohammed El Hendi, a camera operator for the Qatari-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, and his brother and camera assistant, Yousef El Hendi, in a March 18, 2024, offensive on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital complex in which scores of Palestinians were detained, Yousef El Hendi told CPJ in March 2025.
Yousef El Hendi, 24, was released on February 15, 2025, in a prisoner hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas. Mohammed El Hendi, 28, remains in custody.
“They treated us very harshly,” said Yousef El Hendi, describing his detention at a center called Mardawanat in the Gaza envelope, a buffer zone on the Israel-Gaza border.
“These are like animal cages, holding 120 detainees. They [the captors] called them names like Hell, Jahannam [Arabic for hell], and Iqab [Arabic for punishment]. Opposite them, there were two towers for occupation soldiers to monitor us,” he said.
Yousef El Hendi said he also spent two months in the West Bank’s Ofer Prison, where he was subjected to “the most horrific forms of torture and abuse,” and Ktzi’ot prison in southern Israel’s Negev desert, from where he was among several prisoners released “after they threatened us not to make statements to the media.”
He said interrogators accused him of “belonging to Hamas and working with Al Jazeera, which the investigators described as a terrorist channel.”
“As a result of the torture and medical neglect, I developed large boils all over my body, as well as wounds that did not heal for six months, and they never treated me … Every two or three weeks, they give us three painkillers, which we share with 15 other people. In addition, the food is not fit for animals and is in very small quantities.
His weight fell from 110 to 80 kilograms (243 to 176 pounds).
Yousef and Mohammed El Hendi did not appear in CPJ’s 2024 prison census because CPJ was not aware of their cases until Yousef’s release.