Palestinian journalist Mujahed Al-Saadi documents his harrowing experience in Israeli detention two years after being arrested from his home in Jenin.
The first story I commissioned for Drop Site News in September 2024 was about a brutal Israeli military operation on the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. I reached out to Palestinian journalist Mujahed al-Saadi for coverage from the ground on the targeting of Jenin’s hospitals by Israeli troops. A reporter from Jenin who has covered the region since 2012, Al-Saadi was no stranger to the dangers of working as a journalist in Palestine. In 2022, he was just a few feet away from his friend and colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, the legendary Al Jazeera correspondent, when an Israeli sniper shot and killed her.
A couple of weeks after we published his dispatch, Al-Saadi was abducted from his home in Jenin by Israeli forces and thrown into administrative detention, where he was held without charge or trial for nearly two years. He was released on July 14, 2026.
Barely a month after his release, he filed a video dispatch for Drop Site about an Israeli airstrike on a building near his home that killed three Palestinians. The report marked Al-Saadi’s first time back in the field after being released from prison. “The first experience today is the most difficult, as reporting information and news is intertwined with confronting the occupation for the first time,” he said. “But this is the reality I am reporting, and I am trying to convey it for the first time after my release from the occupation’s prisons.”
Nearly 40 Palestinian journalists are currently imprisoned by Israel, the majority of them in administrative detention.
We asked Al-Saadi to write about his harrowing experience in Israeli prison. Below is that account. It is the first in a two-part series. The second, to be published in the coming days, is about Al-Saadi returning to Jenin to find the refugee camp there destroyed by the Israeli military and all of its residents displaced.
— Sharif Abdel Kouddous
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Story by Mujahed Al-Saadi
JENIN, occupied West Bank—Just after midnight on September 19, 2024, a large Israeli military force arrived in the city of Jenin and raided my home in the Al-Saada neighborhood, west of the city. It marked the beginning of what would be a 22-month ordeal of imprisonment for me.
The sounds of explosions filled the air as occupation forces threw concussion grenades and broke down the doors of my house. They moved quickly. Within the first moments of their arrival, I was severely beaten in front of my family. I was then blindfolded and my hands bound. Israeli soldiers searched the house and confiscated my journalistic equipment, including cameras, electronic accessories, and mobiles.
The soldiers hurled insults and obscenities at me, and continued beating me while I was shackled inside their military vehicle. They drove me to a military base west of Jenin, known as Salem Camp, where I spent a full day and night out in the open, without food or water. This was where the opening chapter of my imprisonment began.
Since October 7, 2023, the occupation’s prisons, which are overseen by National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Gvir, have become graveyards for the living. Prisoners are subjected to various forms of abuse, including starvation, humiliation, and deliberate killing through a policy of medical neglect. The number of Palestinians detained by occupation forces since October 7 has topped 25,000, with nearly 10,000 currently behind bars, compared with just over 5,000 prisoners before.
The following day, I was next taken to Megiddo Prison, located near the city of Jenin. I arrived there at 3 a.m. Incoming prisoners are welcomed with severe beatings—this is the ritual and the first stage of being admitted into the prison. I was beaten on sensitive parts of my body, then stripped of all my clothes and given poor quality and foul smelling clothing. All my belongings were taken from me, including my ring and my watch.
Megiddo prison consists of 10 sections. Each section contains 16 cells, with 10 prisoners held in each cell, in a space no larger than 20 square meters (around 215 square feet). At the end of each cell, there is a single bathroom shared by the 10 prisoners.
I was taken into one of the cells and thrown onto the floor. I spent the first night without a mattress or a blanket. A day later, I was given a thin mattress that reeked—it was probably more than 10 years old. This was how the ritual of abuse and torture began, with prisoners deprived of even their most basic rights.
There was hardly any food given to us. The morning meal consisted of no more than 50 grams of yogurt, a few small pieces of cucumber or tomato, and three slices of bread. Meals like this were distributed to all the prisoners. This was the first thing I was given to eat in the 48 hours since my arrest.
Lunch consisted of no more than 30 grams of rice and around 50 grams of legumes, such as chickpeas. The food was served cold. Dinner was just as meager: no more than one egg, 10 grams of hummus, and a few slices of bell pepper.
I weighed 89 kilograms when I was arrested and 59 kilograms when I was released—I lost nearly a third of my weight during my imprisonment.
Since October 7, 2023, the occupation has both reduced the amount of food provided to prisoners and shut down the “cantina,” or “market,” inside each prison section where detainees used to be able to buy personal hygiene products as well as some food and canned goods they could take into the kitchen and prepare themselves.
Some prisoners would save their breakfast, lunch, and dinner and eat all three together as a single meal—just so they could feel full.
An adult male typically needs between 1,500 and 2,000 calories a day, but the three meals we were given amounted to no more than 5% of that. And that’s not to mention the poor quality of the food.
Personal hygiene items were also taken away or withheld from us, including toothbrushes, razors, and nail clippers, along with other basic personal cleaning supplies. My first shower was a full 15 days after my arrest, when I received my first 30-gram packet of shampoo. We would receive just one shampoo packet per week for bathing or any other use. Deprivation of basic hygiene products led to some 95% of prisoners contracting scabies, a skin condition that spread because of poor hygiene, a severe shortage of cleaning supplies, and a lack of clothing. The shortage of clothes was so severe that prisoners were often forced to share.
Scabies is so pervasive and persists for so long in prison, that some prisoners have attempted suicide because of it. Symptoms include rashes that appear all over the body and on sensitive areas, accompanied by constant, distressing itching that prevents prisoners from sleeping or resting. Boils develop that discharge infected blood. Prisoners have also been martyred as a result of systematic medical neglect. One prisoner developed boils on his body near his heart—they burst, causing internal bleeding and infection inside his body.
Before October 7, the number of prisoners with medical files in the occupation’s prisons did not exceed 100. Today, all prisoners have medical files and are in need of intensive treatment. There are also prisoners with heart disease and diabetes, and others who need urgent operations and immediate surgical intervention, but the occupation delays their treatment.
Over 90 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023, many of them from deliberate medical neglect, which includes the withholding of basic medications. In Megiddo, a single Acamol painkiller tablet—if any were available at all—would be shared by more than 10 prisoners who would grind it up and dissolve it in water.
The raids and abuse practiced against me and all the prisoners were carried out through more than five units, including a unit called Dror, assigned after October 7 to the occupation’s prisons to suppress and humiliate prisoners and search their cells.
Today, inside in the occupation’s prisons, even an empty plastic bag, kept by prisoners to store their meager bread rations to prevent it from drying out and spoiling, is considered a prohibited item. A prisoner can be singled out for abuse if a single-use plastic cup is found in his possession. If a prisoner raises the call to prayer aloud, or just practices religious worship inside the cell, this unit is brought in to suppress, beat, and abuse him.
One evening at around 8 p.m., the Dror unit raided my cell in section 9 of Megiddo Prison. They searched the room and beat us. Then they took us outside in the frigid night, stripped us of our clothes, and threw us on the ground. They left us there for more than two hours, our bodies absorbing all that cold. We were forced to lie on our stomachs with our hands shackled behind our backs, our faces at the section’s sewage drain. The stench was unbearable.
After they ransacked the room, they poured shampoo and cold water over our clothes, mattresses, and blankets. When we were taken back into the room, it smelled filthy because they had left garbage on the clothes and soaked everything with water. This was one of the forms of abuse practiced against us. It was a day I will never forget. That night, we all slept on the bare iron beds, without mattresses or blankets. Even the window in the room was left open without glass, leaving us exposed to the winter cold.
Over the past three years, the occupation has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians, with the total at one point reaching over 10,000 prisoners. Many are administrative detainees, held under what is known as the Emergency Administrative Detention Law, which has been used in Palestine since the British Mandate era, and allows authorities to imprison Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial.
I was transferred to administrative detention 72 hours after my arrest. I was detained for six months, an arbitrary detention without a clear charge, based on the claim that I posed a security threat, even though I was just working as a journalist, covering events in the city of Jenin and across the West Bank. After the first six month detention period ended, my administrative detention was renewed a second, third, fourth, and fifth time, until I had spent 22 months in the occupation’s prisons without charge and without any evidence of what the occupation claimed. With the arbitrary extensions, the prisoner does not know when he will be released, increasing the bitterness of detention and the difficulty of adapting to the prison’s conditions. This is how the occupation holds dozens of journalists behind bars.
As for military courts that prosecute Palestinians in the West Bank, there are two: the first is Ofer military court, near the city of Ramallah, and the other is Salem military court, west of Jenin.
Another form of torture and deprivation is the lack of communication with prisoners’ families and restrictions on lawyers visits. Prisoners’ families have to obtain a permit from the Supreme Court approving a private lawyer’s visit to the prisoner—this is the only way to communicate and get some reassurance for both the prisoner and his family.
But the visit costs the prisoner more than 700 shekels (about $230) and lasts only five minutes. Worse still, the prisoner is taken out of the cell at 6 a.m. and waits until three in the afternoon sitting on his knees, blindfolded, and with his hands shackled behind his back. There can be as many as 30 prisoners waiting at one time. Each prisoner is taken out to speak with the lawyer. On rare occasions, a visit may last 10 minutes. This is not enough time to exchange information and news about the prisoner and his family.
During one of my lawyer’s visits, I was taken out of the cell at 6 a.m. I was beaten by the guards, my hands were shackled behind my back, and I was blindfolded. There were around 20 other prisoners waiting in the room with me. When my turn came, they removed my restraints and the blindfold from my eyes. I quickly sat down on the chair across from the lawyer. He was visibly shocked by my appearance, which had completely changed from the photos my wife had sent him on his phone. He stared at me in disbelief. This was after nearly six months of detention.
After I had been sitting in the chair for five minutes, perhaps less, the lawyer told me that my older brother had been martyred during a raid on the city of Jenin in an attempt to arrest one of the neighbors. He was shot inside his home and died after ambulances were prevented from reaching him to provide medical treatment. I remember that I could not contain myself and broke down, crying heavily. Prison guards then beat me severely all over my body. This is how lawyer visits go.
Under Israeli law, a prisoner has the right to a visit lasting between 30 and 45 minutes. But the occupation continues to deprive prisoners of this right.
Life in prison is filled with cruelty, deprivation, humiliation, and indignity, from the first moment of arrest until the moment of release. When I was finally released, I was taken out of the cell early in the morning and given back my belongings that had been confiscated from me on the first day. I was then brought before the prison directors, who threaten and intimidate every prisoner being released. After that, I was held in a cell for more than three hours until the prisoner transport vehicle arrived. I was then driven to one of the checkpoints closest to the occupied Palestinian territories and let go.
When a prisoner comes out of prison it appears that he has grown old, not only from the lack of food and ill treatment but also psychologically, due to the constant humiliation and deprivation. The prisoner reaches a point where he believes he cannot return to life, to humanity. With no direct contact with his family, he reaches a point where he loses confidence in life beyond prison, he believes the outside to be devoid of life.
I used to think of it as a distant dream: the prison gate opening for me to walk out. Then I remember that I really did make it out of that dark graveyard.
The number of prisoners who have died inside the occupation’s prisons since October 7 is many times greater than the number who died during decades past. I developed health problems in my frail body, specifically issues affecting my thyroid and liver. A number of my body’s functions have been impaired because of the lack of nutrition, the lack of food, and the poor hygiene.
When I was arrested, my youngest daughter, Maria, was six months old. When I returned 22 months later, she was over two years old and she did not accept my presence in the house. It took many attempts and nearly 30 days before she accepted me.
Whomever is released from the occupation’s prisons feels as though he has been given a new life. These prisons are mass graves where prisoners wait for their own deaths to be announced.
