On March 18, 2024, Israel Defense Forces launched an offensive on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital complex, arresting scores of Palestinians, including Palestinian journalist Osama al-Sayed, a reporter for the Hamas-funded broadcaster Al-Aqsa TV who also contributes to the Qatari-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to the Beirut-based regional press freedom group SKeyes and al-Sayed’s wife, Hadeel Hamdan, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. Other journalists were also arrested in the raid.
Hamdan told CPJ that a lawyer with a human rights organization told her in May that al-Sayed was being held in the Sde Teiman detention center in Israel near the Gaza border.
“When he was being held in Sde Teiman, the Israeli authorities released a doctor who had been imprisoned with him and he told us that Osama had been tortured and subjected to 16-hour interrogations about his work as a journalist and people he had interviewed in Gaza,” Hamdan said.
In August, al-Sayed was transferred to the West Bank’s Ofer prison and subsequently to Ketziot prison in southern Israel’s Negev desert, near the border with Egypt, his wife said.
Hamdan said she had not seen al-Sayed since October 7, 2023, when they were displaced from Jabalia refugee camp to southern Gaza.
CPJ has been unable to determine whether the journalist has been charged or whether he is suffering from health problems in custody.
Alaa Skafi, director of Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer, told CPJ that journalists from Gaza are generally held under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law. According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the law allows Israel to hold detainees for long periods of time without charge and with limited access to legal counsel. Skafi and B’Tselem both described overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and abuse at Israeli prison facilities housing Palestinian journalists.
Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, which began after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, have devastated the local press. Israel has killed scores of journalists in Gaza as well as six in Lebanon, jailed dozens of Palestinian journalists from Gaza and the West Bank, and destroyed much of the press infrastructure in Gaza, all while preventing the foreign press from entering Gaza.
CPJ emailed the Israel Defense Forces, Israel’s Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, and the Israeli Prison Service in late 2024 for comment on the cases of imprisoned Palestinian journalists but received no response.