JERUSALEM — When Palestinian photojournalist Shady Abu Sedo finally stepped back into Gaza in October, he could barely recognize his children. “When I saw them, honestly, it was a shock,” he said the first time he had laid eyes on them since his arrest seven months earlier, according to Arab News.
Abu Sedo, 35, was detained in March 2024 while covering the chaos around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, then the epicenter of Israel’s assault. Israeli forces accused Hamas of using the medical complex as a command post; aid organizations accused Israel of turning it into a battlefield.
He was taken to Sde Teiman, a military detention center inside Israel, and held under the country’s “unlawful combatants” law — a provision allowing the imprisonment of Gazans for months without charge or trial.
“Imagine, one hundred days from five in the morning until eleven at night, kneeling, handcuffed, blindfolded, forbidden to speak,” Abu Sedo told AFP after his release on October 13, part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that exchanged roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners for 20 Israeli hostages. “You don’t know the time, the days, or where you are.”
He said he endured torture before interrogators even confirmed his identity, suffering eye and ear injuries. Later moved to Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, he described conditions as “beyond imagination.” For months, he had no contact with his family and saw his lawyer only twice.
The Israeli military declined to comment. The Israel Prison Service maintains that all inmates are treated in accordance with legal standards, with access to medical care and “adequate living conditions.”
Israel expanded the unlawful combatants law at the start of the Gaza war, stretching detention periods dramatically: suspects can now be held 45 days without administrative review and 75 days without court hearings, extendable to 180 days.
Amnesty International has called for the law’s repeal, describing it as a tool to “arbitrarily round up Palestinian civilians and toss them into a virtual black hole.”
Israel has also barred the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting such detainees, effectively codifying a blackout that began when the war erupted in 2023. Rights groups estimate about 1,000 Palestinians remain in this legal limbo.
“For these prisoners,” said Naji Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, “the lawyer is their only connection to the outside world.”
