On December 11, 2023, Israeli security forces arrested Palestinian photographer and camera operator Osama Dabour, who works for the pro-Islamic Jihad broadcaster Al-Quds Today, in a school in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza, according to the Beirut-based regional press freedom group SKeyes and Dabour’s wife, Amani al-Basyouni, who spoke to CPJ.
Al-Basyouni, who is displaced with her two children in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, told CPJ that the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs had notified her in June that Dabour was being held in Ktzi’ot prison in southern Israel’s Negev desert, near the border with Egypt. Duaa Abu Ein, a lawyer for the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs, told CPJ that the Israeli authorities had confirmed that Dabour was in the Ketziot prison.
“They told us that he had been arrested because he is a journalist, which is strange because they usually don’t say this,” he said.
On September 18, a lawyer for the Palestinian Commission of Detainee Affairs met Dabour in prison and the journalist told him that he was severely beaten during his arrest, forced to strip naked, and the soldiers took US$2,700 from him.
Dabour said the conditions in jail were very bad and he had been regularly beaten, deprived of food, humiliated, and had not received medical treatment for skin diseases, Abu Ein said.
Abu Ein said that since October 7 the majority of detainees from Gaza held in Israeli prisons have been subjected to torture, sexual harassment, and mistreatment, according to interviews that his organization has conducted with scores of prisoners through its work in providing them with legal aid.
CPJ was unable to determine if the journalist has been formally charged.
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.