On March 18, 2024, Israel Defense Forces launched a new offensive on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital complex, arresting scores of Palestinians, including Shadi Abu Sido, a camera operator on assignment for the privately owned Beirut-based broadcaster Palestine Today, CPJ was told by his cousin Rami Abu Sido and Majida Karajah, a lawyer with the Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer, via messaging app. Other journalists were also arrested in the raid.
“Abu Sido was working as a cameraman at Al-Shifa hospital when Israeli forces arrested him. He already suffers from several medical conditions and he was severely tortured and didn’t receive any medical treatment. Israel accused him of being an unlawful combatant,” said Karajah, whose organization visited the journalist in the West Bank’s Ofer prison in July.
CPJ was unable to determine whether the journalist was facing formal charges.
“Former detainees who were released from Israeli jails told us that he was being held in an Israeli jail and that he could only see with one eye as a result of severe torture,” Rami Abu Sido told CPJ.
Alaa Skafi, director of 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.