JERUSALEM: Denied contact with his lawyer for months, now freed Palestinian prisoner Shady Abu Sedo said he lost all sense of time while he was held in Israeli jails during the war in Gaza.
The 35-year-old resident of the Palestinian territory was arrested in March 2024, five months into the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Abu Sedo, a photojournalist, said he was arrested while working at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and detained at Sde Teiman prison, a military facility in Israel used to hold Gazans during the war.
At the time of his arrest the Al-Shifa complex was at the center of the war, with humanitarian organizations accusing Israel of rights violations while Israel accused Hamas of using it and other civilian facilities as command centers.
Abu Sedo was held under Israel’s “unlawful combatants” law, which permits the detention of suspected members of “hostile forces” for months on end without charge.
Abu Sedo said he was repeatedly confronted with claims from the Israelis that “they had killed our children, our women and bombed our homes.”
“So, when I saw (my children), honestly, it was a shock,” he told AFP by telephone after his release to Gaza on October 13 under the US-brokered ceasefire.
The truce, which came into effect on October 10, saw 20 living hostages returned by Hamas to Israel in exchange for approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
“Imagine, 100 days from five in the morning until 11 at night, sitting on your knees, handcuffed, blindfolded, forbidden to speak or talk,” Abu Sedo said.
“You don’t know the time, you don’t know the days, you don’t know where you are.”
“After 100 days of torture, they took me for interrogation to confirm my identity. They tortured me without knowing who I was,” he said, describing eye and ear injuries.
Then came a transfer to Ofer military prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he said conditions were “beyond imagination.”
During his incarceration, Abu Sedo was able to speak with his lawyer only twice.
He said he hadn’t been charged and that his detention had been “automatically extended” without explanation.
The Israeli military declined to comment on his case.
The Israel prison service says all inmates “are held according to legal procedures, and their rights including access to medical care and adequate living conditions are upheld.”
- ‘Unlawful combatants’ -
According to the Red Cross, the term “unlawful combatant” refers to someone who “belongs to an armed group, in a context where either the individual or the group do not fulfil the conditions for combatant status.”
The term emerged in the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when the administration of George W. Bush used it to justify the detention of terrorism suspects.
It was introduced into Israeli law in 2002 and denies protections typically granted to detainees and prisoners of war.
Israel then amended the law at the start of the Gaza war.
Under the revised legislation, prisoners can be detained for 45 days without an administrative process, compared with 96 hours previously.
Prisoners can be held for 75 days without a court hearing, up from 14 days, and this can be extended to 180 days.
In July 2024, Amnesty International demanded the law be repealed.
It said the legislation served to “arbitrarily round up Palestinian civilians from Gaza and toss them into a virtual black hole for prolonged periods without producing any evidence that they pose a security threat.”
- ‘Months to get appointment’ -
In late October, Israel issued an order banning the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting prisoners held as “unlawful combatants.”
In practice, that will make law the status quo that has prevailed since the beginning of the war in Gaza.
The ICRC says it has not been allowed to visit detainees in jail since then, save for pre-release interviews conducted under ceasefire and prisoner exchange deals.
Several rghts groups have denounced what they say is a form of incommunicado detention for Palestinian prisoners, hampering the legal defense of detainees.
Israel holds around 1,000 “unlawful combatants” in military and civilian prisons, according to several NGOs.
For these detainees, “the lawyer is their only connection to the outside world,” said Naji Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights.
The rights group says that 18 doctors and dozens of other health professionals from Gaza are still languishing without charge in Israeli prisons.
“It takes months to get an appointment. We visit them but we have a lot of difficulties,” said Abbas, adding that such visits often lasted less than half an hour.
Several NGOs have appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to grant the Red Cross access to “unlawful combatants,” but no date has been set for the decision.
