Jenin, West Bank
Ali al-Samoudi gingerly walks down the steps towards his dwelling.
The 59-year-old Palestinian journalist is gaunt, with carefully cropped grey hair and an identical beard. Each cautious step he takes reveals the bodily toll of all he has endured that has aged him past his years.
We’ve labored with Samoudi for years, and that is the primary time we’ve seen him in individual in over a year. We can barely acknowledge him.
Samoudi was launched final week from Israeli prison, the place he was held for a year. He was by no means charged with a criminal offense, held as a substitute below administrative detention orders, which permit the Israeli navy to imprison Palestinians with out trial for as much as six months at a time. The orders could be renewed indefinitely.
“It was a real hell. Prison today is hell in every sense of the word,” Samoudi stated in an interview at his dwelling in Jenin. “Everything they practiced with us was punishment and revenge.”
He is one in all 105 Palestinian journalists who’ve been detained and imprisoned since October 7, 2023, the bulk additionally held with out cost, in keeping with the Committee to Protect Journalists. The startling scale of detentions made Israel the third-worst jailer of journalists for 2025, behind solely China and Myanmar, in keeping with CPJ. Thirty-three Palestinian journalists are nonetheless imprisoned in Israel, the group stated.
Samoudi is a widely known journalist who has labored as a neighborhood producer and fixer for NCS, amongst different worldwide shops. He was at Shireen Abu Akleh’s aspect when the Palestinian American journalist was fatally shot by Israeli troops in 2022. He was additionally shot in the shoulder in the identical incident.
Despite his 4 a long time of reporting expertise, Samoudi stated he was shocked by the situations in Israeli prisons, the place he says he endured bodily and psychological abuse that generally left him questioning whether or not he would make it out of prison alive. Israel’s Prison Service didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark about Samoudi’s detention.
Samoudi misplaced 60 kilos (132 kilos), or about half his physique weight, throughout his year in prison.
“They basically gave us food only to keep us alive,” Samoudi stated. “Breakfast consists of one spoon of labneh, a quarter spoon of jam. For lunch: four spoons of rice in addition to two slices of cucumber or two slices of tomato or two slices of sweet pepper.”
He described dinner as a “deluxe” meal: two spoonfuls of hummus, a spoonful of tahini and an egg. Saturdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays the prison service would add a small piece of hen or meat, he stated.
Dozens of different Palestinian prisoners have additionally emerged from Israeli prisons emaciated. Israel’s supreme courtroom ordered enchancment in prison situations after it dominated in September that the state was failing to satisfy prisoners’ primary dietary wants. But Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right nationwide safety minister who oversees the prisons, has doubled down on his draconian strategy, boasting in regards to the poor high quality of meals in prison and the “bare minimum of bare minimum” being supplied.
Books, pens and paper have been all banned, Samoudi stated. The dollop of shampoo he acquired every week was labeled as being for canine, he stated. And each transfer inside or between prisons introduced with it bodily abuse.
Trips to detention hearings introduced beatings. So did these to the clinic.
“One time after I returned from a visit with the lawyer, they threw us on the ground, on our faces and they started hitting us,” Samoudi stated. “An Israeli officer stood and stepped on my head like this and pressed my face into the ground for four minutes until I suffocated.”
But it’s what he witnessed others endure that’s most tough for Samoudi to recount:, just like the younger man in his cell who was refused medical therapy.
Samoudi says one in all his cellmates, Louay Turkman, a 22-year-old from Jenin who was additionally held below administrative detention, turned gravely ailing one evening.
“We asked them to take him to the clinic, but they refused,” Samoudi stated.
The subsequent morning, the guards nonetheless wouldn’t take him to the clinic and so Samoudi and different prisoners took him on a mattress out to the yard.
Turkman died there, in entrance of his fellow prisoners, Samoudi stated.
“He did nothing,” Samoudi says, his voice cracking. “Why? Are we not human?” (Israel’s Prison Service didn’t reply to questions on Turkman’s demise.)
When Samoudi was detained in April 2025, the Israeli navy claimed he was suspected of financing the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, a delegated terrorist group in Israel and the United States.
Labeling Samoudi a “terrorist,” the Israeli navy stated Samoudi was “identified with the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization and suspected in the transfer of funds to the terrorist organization.”
“Bullshit,” Samoudi stated when requested in regards to the declare.
Not solely was Samoudi by no means charged with any crime, however he says interrogators by no means raised the declare of financing Islamic Jihad or some other terrorist group.
Instead, he stated interrogators questioned him about his reporting and alleged he was endangering Israeli safety.
“My arrest is part of the Israeli war against the Palestinian press and media. To silence my voice and block my camera and break my pen, and thus prevent me from practicing my right that all laws and international norms guarantee: the freedom of the press,” Samoudi stated.
Asked whether or not he’s afraid that talking out might land him again in prison, Samoudi responds with understanding laughter.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Correct. Certainly, I fear that they will arrest me,” Samoudi stated. “There are many journalists who were released and re-arrested.”
But he says he received’t be deterred from returning to his work as a journalist.
“My journalistic work is part of my life,” Samoudi stated. “It is my mission in this life.”