Palestinian journalist Yousef Sharaf, who works at the new media department at the local Shehab Media Agency, is being held in a prison in Israel’s Negev desert after he was arrested by Israeli forces in Gaza.
On March 19, 2024, Israeli forces at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City arrested Sharaf, 40, who was sheltering in the complex with many others after his home was bombed, killing several family members. His detention was part of an Israeli offensive on the complex during which scores of Palestinians, including journalists, were arrested.
Alaa Skafi, director of Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer, told CPJ that the organization’s lawyer visited Sharaf in the Ketziot prison in the Negev desert in November and that Sharaf recalled that soldiers woke him up to arrest him and took him through the hospital’s outpatient clinic. “There they stripped me and the rest of the detainees of our clothes, tied our hands and blindfolded us, and kicked us on our bodies and faces.”
Skafi said Sharaf told the lawyer that “the beating escalated until they started punching us with their hands, and tied our hands with plastic ties so tightly that the skin started to tear from our hands, and then they took us in a truck to an area with gravel, and they started asking me my name, and they learned that I am a journalist for the Shehab Agency and they found my pictures published on my Facebook account.”
Skafi said that Sharaf told Addameer’s lawyer that he was beaten with rifle butts for hours, and then was transferred from one prison to another until he ended up in the Negev desert prison. Skafi said that Sharaf was charged in military with belonging to a terrorist organization and sentenced to an “unlimited prison term.” “In the past few days, he was brought back to trial, and the judge sentenced him to prison until the end of the war.”
Skafi said that an investigator from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency told Sharaf that he was arrested because he is a journalist, as he may have information about the Hamas militant group, which Israel is fighting in Gaza, due to his work.
Skafi 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, and destroyed much of the press infrastructure in Gaza, all while preventing the foreign press from entering Gaza.
CPJ emailed the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet with questions about the charges, health, accusations, and sentence against Sharaf, in addition to information about how his trial was conducted, but did not receive a response.