Administrative detention is the occupation’s policy to prosecute Palestinian journalists policy

Ramallah- “I was not directly threatened not to return to journalistic work again, but the repeated targeting was clear because of my journalistic work, as if it were an indirect message to stop.”

With these words, Palestinian journalist Alaa Al-Rimawi, freed from administrative detention for two years, responded to Al Jazeera’s question regarding the occupation’s threat to stop his journalistic work.

Al-Rimawi, who was released on October 6, lives in a state of fear of returning to his work, wondering if the occupation “succeeded in changing its priorities with this kind of revenge” to which he was subjected during his imprisonment. “If I answered yes, then I have wronged myself and my profession, and if no, then I have wronged my family. I am living this struggle now between self-injustice and the message we carried, and the family and the unbearable pain.”

Al-Rimawi was arrested on the 19th of the same month in 2023, after his son was arrested from home and threatened with the need to surrender himself in order to release his son. After he arrived at Ofer Prison to surrender himself, the journey of beatings and abuse began.

He says, “The first stage of beating was from the treating doctor when I told him that I was in the hospital half an hour ago, so he hit me in the face and stomach.”

Great suffering

Al-Rimawi was then transferred to the Etzion Detention Center near Bethlehem in the south, and thrown on the ground for 8 hours during which the soldiers trampled him with their shoes, until he was taken to an interrogation room. He was surprised by the officer carrying a phone and making a video call with Israeli soldiers in the “Gaza envelope.” He told them, “With me here is the journalist who said about you on Al Jazeera that you were defeated,” and he beat him severely in front of them while they were laughing.

Al-Rimawi spoke to Al-Jazeera Net about his suffering that continued until the last day of his release. “I was transferred to a room containing 100 completely naked prisoners and the soldiers were beating them in all parts of their bodies. I broke the ribs in my chest 8 times for no reason other than that they enjoyed beating the prisoners.”

A few days later, he was transferred to administrative detention, and his detention was renewed for two years. There was nothing to convict him of, but the occupation resorted to this type of detention, which allows it to arrest whoever it wants, including journalists, without charge and with retaliation.

According to the definition of the Addameer Foundation for Prisoner Care and Human Rights (an independent Palestinian NGO), administrative detention is detention without charge or trial, which relies on a secret file and secret evidence that the detainee or his lawyer cannot access. According to Israeli military orders – derived from the British Mandate emergency laws of 1945 – his order can be renewed unlimited times, each of which does not exceed 6 months.

The arrest is based on a secret file whose contents no one knows except the judge, and gives occupation intelligence wide scope to recommend that every journalist poses a threat to Israel’s security and therefore should be arrested, without details and without an opportunity for him or his lawyer to refute or refute these charges.

Arrests doubled

Recently, administrative detention orders against Palestinian journalists have doubled, which, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, has increased from one before October 7, 2023, to 20 currently.

Since the beginning of this year, all orders against detained journalists have been administrative, as is the case with journalist Muhammad Mona from the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, who has been detained since last September 27.

Muhammad Mona is administratively detained for the second time since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. He was released last April. His family believes that his re-arrest is due to his journalistic work, as he is a correspondent for Sanad News Agency.

His wife, Sawsan Mona, told Al Jazeera, “After his arrest, we received a phone call from him informing us that he had been transferred to administrative detention without investigation and no charge brought against him.”

Mona’s family fears that Israel will renew his detention, as happened the first time, which lasted 19 months. Sawsan confirms that “administrative detention has no ceiling, and the fate of the detainee is linked to the recommendation of the occupation intelligence, which sees my husband’s journalistic work as a threat to it.”

Among the administrative detainees is also photojournalist Moaz Amarneh from the Dheisheh camp near the city of Bethlehem. He was arrested last August while passing through a military checkpoint between Bethlehem and Hebron, and was transferred directly to administrative detention for 4 months, without investigation, “as if the decision had been prepared in advance,” according to his wife, Walaa Amarneh.

This is his second administrative detention as well. He was arrested days after the war on the Gaza Strip. He was initially charged with incitement, and after the occupation was unable to prove it against him, he was transferred to administrative detention, where he spent 9 months in prison.

Amarneh suffers from a head injury after a bullet fragment lodged in his head after he was targeted by the occupation during coverage and was injured in his eye in 2019. During his first arrest, he lived in extremely dangerous health conditions, and his injury and the sensitivity of his condition were not taken into account, which his family now fears will happen again.

His wife, Walaa, told Al Jazeera, “The occupation tried to dissuade Moaz from working as a journalist repeatedly. He was subjected to threats and intelligence officers asked him more than once to leave his job, which made him subject to arrest again.”

To prevent the spread of the faces of the soldiers… Israeli occupation soldiers force Palestinian journalists to delete video clips from their phones during the storming of the city of Ramallah in the central West Bank. pic.twitter.com/nAsbvBtHOm

– Al Jazeera Mubasher (@ajmubasher) September 16, 2025

Occupation objectives

The severity of administrative detention against journalists has increased in recent months, although their detention has not stopped since the beginning of the aggression on Gaza, as data from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club indicate.

Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli occupation forces have administratively arrested 31 male and female journalists, meaning a third of the journalists arrested from the West Bank since the beginning of the war. Now, out of 28 journalists detained from the West Bank after the aggression, 20 of them are administratively detained, which indicates that this ruling is being used as a means by the occupation to make journalists disappear.

According to the Media Director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Amani Farajneh, the administrative detention practiced against journalists is not a new method, but it was used more and more clearly after the war of genocide on the Gaza Strip.

In her interview with Al Jazeera, Farajneh continued that at the beginning of the war, the occupation was directing charges of incitement against journalists, taking advantage of the expansion of the concept of incitement in Israeli laws, but recently most of those arrested have been transferred to administrative detention, which confirms that the goal is to exclude them from the media arena.

She said that this arrest did not prevent the occupation from practicing the harshest practices against these journalists, referring to testimonies collected from the released journalists about “severe torture, rape, and threats of rape.”

According to Farajneh, the goal beyond disappearance is to target the image of the journalist, which has come to represent the spirit of continuity and challenge, and she stresses that “the targeting is due to the challenge that the Palestinian journalist represents, and the model that is willing to sacrifice everything in order to convey the truth, which we saw clearer in Gaza by targeting journalists with killing.”