Source: Asia Pacific Report
Pacific Media Watch
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused the Israeli army and internal security agency Shin Bet of repeatedly perpetrating inhumane acts against Palestinian journalists from Gaza.
The Paris-based global media freedom monitoring and advocacy movement says it has interviewed five Gazan journalists who were imprisoned in Israel after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.
They described targeted arrests, interrogations related to their work, torture and brutal abuse at the hands of their Israeli captors.
READ MORE: Other Gaza journalists media freedom reports
The journalists include Alaa al-Sarraj, a cameraman for the Ain Media production company; Diaa al-Kahlout, local bureau chief of the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed; Shady Abu Sedo, a cameraman with the Palestine Today television channel; and Emad al-Ifranji, the local editor of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds.
The fifth journalist requested anonymity for fear of Israeli army reprisals.
They were all initially imprisoned at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel, about 30 km from the Gaza Strip, which has been denounced by Israeli and international human rights organisations as a torture camp.
“The facts reported here are damning for the Israeli authorities, including the Israeli army, Shin Bet and judiciary,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk
“They arrested these journalists knowing their profession and, in some cases, because of it.
“The work of these journalists was used as grounds for interrogation amounting to torture, during arbitrary detention legalised by judges. These repeated acts speak to a systematic persecution of journalists in Palestine aimed at preventing media coverage of human rights violations by the Israeli state.
“RSF continues to demand the immediate release of all Palestinian journalists arbitrarily detained by Israel.”
RSF reports:
The time when Palestine Today cameraman Shady Abu Sedo was reporting now seems like a distant memory. In fact, he was last reporting as recently as 18 March 2024. He had gone to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to interview victims of the Israeli bombings, launched five months earlier in retaliation for the attacks by Hamas’s armed wing on 7 October 2023.
Arrested by soldiers after identifying himself as a journalist, he was held for 572 days, initially at the Sde Teiman military base, located 30 kms from the Gaza Strip in the Negev desert, and then in Ofer and Ketziot-Al Naqab prisons.
At the end of these 19 months of torture, deprivation, interrogations and violence, some of it related to his profession, he remains, at 36, scarred by psychological trauma and physical aftereffects that prevent him from returning to work.
“Since you left your camera at Al-Shifa Hospital, I’m going to gouge your eye out,” one of his captors told him, referring to the location of his arrest, before beating him repeatedly in the face.
His right eye has not regained its sight. The scabies he contracted in prison continues to plague him, and he now suffers from epilepsy, insomnia and anorexia.
“After the scenes I have witnessed, I can no longer stay at home within four walls, nor look at the sky without having a fit. If I don’t take sedatives, I suddenly start screaming,” he says.
He was released on 11 October 2025.
None of the five journalists interviewed by RSF was able to resume working as a journalist after their release. When not the result of serious physical and psychological injuries inflicted during their detention, Israeli army destruction has been to blame.
After his release, Shady Abu Sedo did not find his home, which had been hit by Israeli aircraft.
“I lost my house, my car, and all my reporting equipment worth more than $50,000 [about 43,000 euros],” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was detained for 692 days, from 16 November 2023 to 11 October 2025.
“But I could start again from scratch,” said the 35-year-old employee of the Ain Media production company, whose entire archive of reports was destroyed. Two of its journalists were killed by the Israel army, while another is imprisoned and two have been missing since 7 October 2023.
Waving his press card
Like Shady Abu Sedo, the four other media professionals interviewed by RSF said they explicitly told the Israeli army that they were journalists — whose work must be protected in war zones under international law — at the time of their arrest in the Gaza Strip.
Alaa al-Sarraj was arrested on 16 November 2023 at the Netzarim checkpoint, which the Israeli army set up on Salah al-Din Road to screen the population in the centre of the besieged territory.
“I was interrogated there, I confirmed that I was a journalist, and it was on that basis that I was arrested,” he said.
The following month, Diaa al-Kahlout, then director of the Gaza bureau of the Qatar-based international daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (“The New Arab in English”), even brandished his press card while repeatedly stating his profession to the Israeli soldiers who arrested him on 7 December 2023, in Beit Lahya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
“It doesn’t matter,” one of them reportedly told him, before he found himself among a group of several hundred captive men, stripped naked and bound, as evidenced by a video filmed by an Israeli soldier.
Throughout his arrest and subsequent transfer, the journalist, then aged 37, was beaten and interrogated by the soldiers escorting him, as well as by an officer who claimed to belong to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.
They questioned him about his articles, his alleged ties to Hamas members, and the owner of his media outlet.
When he tried to explain, a soldier gagged him with tape.
“I lost all hope,” he recalls, at that moment, the last before being “thrown into a truck” and forcibly taken into Israeli territory.
“I know you, you’re a journalist”
Now aged 57, Emad al-Ifranji, the Gaza director of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, had no need to introduce himself. He was immediately identified by the Israeli soldier who arrested him on the night of 18 March 2024 at Al-Shifa Hospital, where he had gone to get electricity and an internet connection for work.
“I know you, you’re a veteran journalist,” the soldier reportedly told him.
“I replied that it was true,” Emad al-Ifranji said. “He dragged me roughly out of the outpatient clinic building, and that’s when the ordeal began.”
From Sde Teiman to Ofer, Ketziot and Nafah
This descent into Israeli prison hell began inside the barracks at Sde Teiman.
“From there, you lose your name and become just a number,” said Emad al-Ifranji, who, like Shady Abu Sedo, was held for 572 days.
At the mercy of their captors, the journalists reported having been subjected to violence, humiliation and deprivation. Their accounts share a common thread: terror at the random beatings they endured while constantly blindfolded.
The resulting fractures were systematically left untreated, leading to painful and often irreversible complications. The limited food and sleep they were allowed barely kept them alive to endure the blows and insults of gleeful soldiers. Some witnessed fellow prisoners being murdered and one raped by a dog.
After Sde Teiman, four of the journalists interviewed were taken to Ofer prison, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where a military unit has been established for prisoners from Gaza, and to Ketziot-Al Naqab prison, near the Egyptian Sinai, preceded, in Alaa al-Sarraj’s case, by Nafha prison in the southern Negev.
Violations and ill-treatment of prisoners continued to be the norm there. Only Diaa al-Kahlout was released after 33 days of violence and cruel and inhumane treatment endured on the Israeli military base.
Aman and Shin Bet interrogations
Those who emerged from Sde Teiman speak of a machinery designed to “subjugate men,” said one of the five surviving journalists.
The brutal interrogations, which are a crucial part of the torture machine, subject journalists to special treatment. For example, Shady Abu Sedo, before being handed over to the officer who injured his right eye, was tied for hours to the “fridge,” a cell measuring two metres by one metre equipped with air conditioning that “bites you to the bone.”
He said he was then interrogated specifically about his work by an officer with the military intelligence agency Aman: Had he filmed in the northern Gaza Strip? Was he there reporting on 7 October 2023? Did he know any journalists who had covered the attacks by Hamas fighters?
“I killed all the journalists, and those I couldn’t kill, I brought them here,” Shady Abu Sedo quotes his interrogator as saying. He was then imprisoned for several days in the “disco,” a building in Sde Teiman designed to wear prisoners down by means of powerful speakers that continuously blast music.
Another journalist interviewed by RSF was also subjected to this torture.
While almost all the detainees at Sde Teiman underwent such interrogations, particularly regarding the fate of Israeli hostages, reporters were subjected to “technical questions focused on journalistic work in the Gaza Strip,” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was questioned about his academic background and professional network, including doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, politicians, political organisations and his colleagues in Gaza.
“They also asked me what you might call strategic questions,” he said.
Emad al-Ifranji and Diaa al-Kahlout, who held positions of responsibility within their media outlets, were subjected to no fewer than four extremely violent interrogations at the hands of Aman and the Shin Bet, a sign of the special attention paid to journalists in an attempt to obtain information deemed tactical by the Israeli authorities in the context of the conflict.
In March 2024, during the first weeks of his imprisonment in Sde Teiman, Emad al-Ifranji was questioned twice, in separate interrogations about 10 days apart, about his interview 13 years before with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, who was wanted by the Israeli army, which regarded him as the organiser of the 7 October 2023 attacks. Sinwar was killed for this on 16 October 2024.
Regarded by Israel’s justice system as ‘unlawful combatants’
Judges at the Beersheva court have given a veneer of legality to the prolonged detention of civilians identified by Israeli intelligence as journalists.
In a series of expedited hearings conducted via videoconference or telephone, and without legal representation, the Southern District Court of Israel — which has jurisdiction under a 2002 law on “illegal combatants,” revised after 7 October 2023 and applicable to the thousands of detainees in Gaza — has repeatedly approved their continued indefinite detention.
“The assumption is that if a detainee meets the definition of a journalist, this fact is brought to the court’s attention; however, we do not hold specific information to that effect,” Israel’s justice ministry said.
As in the case of its use against journalists, this law, based on a term that is “undefined and is therefore open to abuse and inconsistent with the principle of legality,” according to a 2007 UN report, makes it possible to “to justify arresting all these thousands of detainees from Gaza and keeping them based on secret information for indefinite periods,” said a lawyer specialising in the Israeli prison system for Palestinians.
Four soldiers had laser sights trained on Emad al-Ifranji’s face during his initial court hearing, although the Justice Ministry later claimed to have “no knowledge” of this.
The hearing lasted less than five minutes, but he managed to remind the court that he was “protected under international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Addressing a judge in Beersheba via webcam, Shady Abu Sedo asked, “How can I be an illegal fighter? I’m a journalist.”
The judge’s response was categorical: “You belong to the Palestinian terrorist press.”
A few days before their release, these journalists were summoned by Israeli military intelligence, which routinely subjects detainees to a final act of intimidation. Some of them report having been explicitly warned against resuming their work.
Contacted by RSF regarding the accounts of their imprisonment provided by these five journalists, the Israeli army claimed that it “does not intentionally harm journalists” and that, despite the mounting evidence, it “rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including journalists.”
Shin Bet did not respond to RSF’s questions.
According to RSF data, 19 Palestinian journalists are currently detained arbitrarily by the Israeli authorities. Two of them, like the sources cited in this article, were captured in the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023.
They are Hani Issa, editor-in-chief of Quds Net, and Amjad Arafat, a reporter for the Ain Media production company.
Ali Samoudi, a leading Palestinian journalist and veteran reporter based in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, was released on 30 April 2026, after a year of wrongful imprisonment.
On the day of his release, he reported that he lost nearly 60 kilos while held, blaming the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of Israeli authorities.
Israel is ranked 116th and Palestine 156th out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/28/palestinian-journalists-from-gaza-treated-inhumanely-by-israeli-army-and-shin-bet-accuses-rsf/