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Shady Abu Sedo only remembers darkness, blur, pain, and loss of direction and time.For months, the original photojournalist
Palestine
said he was living in a ‘black hole’ while being detained by Israeli authorities amid the Gaza war.
The 35-year-old man was arrested in March 2024, five months after war broke out due to Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 2023. At that time, Abu Sedo was working at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, when Israeli troops detained him and took him to the Sde Teiman military prison, a facility used to detain Gazans during the war.
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The Al-Shifa complex itself has become a flashpoint for conflict.Israel accuses Hamas of using the hospital as a command center, while humanitarian agencies accuse Israel of violating human rights in its military operations there.
Abu Sedo was detained under Israel’s ‘illegal combatant’ law, which allows detention without charge for months for people suspected of being part of an ‘enemy’ group.
“Imagine, 100 days from five in the morning to eleven at night, sitting on your knees, hands cuffed, eyes closed, and no talking,” he told
AFP
by telephone after being released on October 13 under a United States-brokered ceasefire agreement.
“You don’t know the time, you don’t know the day, you don’t know where you are.”
He said he was tortured even before his identity was confirmed.”After 100 days of torture, they just checked who I was. They tortured me without knowing who I was,” he said, citing injuries to his eyes and ears.
After that, Abu Sedo was transferred to the Ofer military prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.There, he said, conditions were ‘unimaginable’.During his detention, he was only allowed to speak to his lawyer twice.
He also said he was never formally charged and his detention continued to be “automatically extended without explanation.”
The Israeli military declined to comment on his case.Meanwhile, the Israel Penitentiary Service said all detainees were “detained in accordance with legal procedures, with rights including access to medical services and decent living conditions maintained.”
‘Illegal combatant’ law
The term ‘illegal combatant’ refers to someone who is involved in an armed group, but does not meet the legal requirements to be recognized as a war combatant.This term first became popular in the United States after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was then adopted by Israel in 2002.
The law provides a loophole for Israel to detain suspects without charge.At the start of the Gaza war, the law was even revised to extend the period of detention without legal process from 96 hours to 45 days, and without trial from 14 days to 75 days, with the possibility of extending it to 180 days.
Amnesty International in July 2024 called for the law to be repealed.According to the agency, the rules are used to “arbitrarily detain Palestinian civilians and throw them into a legal black hole without any evidence of any security threat.”
Contact and visits are prohibited
In late October, Israel also banned the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting prisoners held as ‘illegal combatants’.This step in practice confirms the conditions that have existed since the beginning of the Gaza war.
The ICRC says it cannot visit detainees, except for interviews ahead of release in a ceasefire or prisoner exchange deal.
A number of human rights organizations have criticized the practice as a form of incommunicado detention, which hinders detainees’ legal defense.It is estimated that Israel is currently holding around 1,000 people with ‘illegal combatant’ status in military and civilian prisons.
“For them, lawyers are the only connection with the outside world,” said Naji Abbas of the group Physicians for Human Rights.
He added that 18 doctors and dozens of health workers from Gaza were still languishing in prison without charge.
“It took months just to get a visit scheduled. And when we finally did, the time given was less than half an hour,” he said.
A number of human rights organizations have applied to Israel’s Supreme Court to allow the Red Cross to visit the detainees again, but no hearing date has been set.
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