At about 4:30 a.m. on Oct. 19, 2023, Israeli military forces raided 18-year-old Mohammad Al-Rimawi’s home in Ramallah, looking to arrest his father.
When his father, Palestinian journalist Alaa Al-Rimawi, was not home, the Israelis instead arrested his eldest son, Mohammad Al-Rimawi — keeping him blindfolded the entire time he was in custody, he told Capital News Service in an interview in Arabic.
The military notified the family that Alaa Al-Rimawi, director of the J-Media news agency — a popular media agency that sells video content to local and international outlets, had to turn himself in in order for his son to be released, according to his family and a video Alaa Al-Rimawi posted on social media.
About 12 hours after his son was arrested, Alaa Al-Rimawi, 45, who was in the hospital when the military raided his home, went to Israel’s Ofer Prison near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. It was not his first imprisonment as a journalist. He arrived with a bag packed with medicine and clothes, which was confiscated.
Mohammad Al-Rimawi said he was held for interrogation for four more hours after his father’s arrival.
Alaa Al-Rimawi is still being held more than a year later. Under what Israel calls “administrative detention,” it is allowed to hold detainees without charges, without a trial date and with little contact with the outside world. It is used in cases where authorities believe the prisoner may pose a security threat to Israel in the future, said Milena Ansari, a researcher at the international organization Human Rights Watch.
After six months, the period can be renewed again and again indefinitely and without trial, citing “secret information,” Ansari said.
Al-Rimawi’s murky fate mirrors that of other Palestinian journalists who have been imprisoned by Israeli authorities while covering Israel’s war against Hamas.
There are currently nearly 3,500 administrative detainees held by Israel. About 100 of them are children, according to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a prisoner advocacy group in the region. This is about triple the number held before Oct. 7, 2023, according to Jenna Abu Hasna, Addameer’s international advocacy officer.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack in Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and took some 200 others hostage.
Seventy five journalists have been arrested in the Palestinian territories since the war began in October 2023 – three by Palestinian authorities and the rest by Israel. Some 45 of them remain detained by Israel today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom organization.
“It is still a very powerful way of silencing journalists and making sure that they don’t speak out and that their colleagues don’t speak out,” said Jonathan Dagher, head of the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders’ Middle East desk, in an interview with CNS. “Every journalist in prison threatens journalists everywhere who are working.”
The Embassy of Israel in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
A dangerous profession
At least 137 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began, including two Israelis, six Lebanese and the rest Palestinian, CPJ reported — the most in a year since the organization began collecting data 32 years ago. Israeli forces killed all but two of those journalists; the others were killed by Hamas during the initial attack.
CPJ found that at least eight media workers were purposefully targeted and killed by Israeli forces, which is prohibited by the international laws of war. CPJ is investigating at least 20 other journalists’ deaths as possible targeted killings.
“Israel simply doesn’t want the media, local, regional or international, to cover its own crimes in Palestine,” said Khalil Jahshan, executive director of the non-profit research organization Arab Center Washington DC.
Israel declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas the day after the attack, launching airstrikes and attacks across the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people, and later, into the West Bank and Lebanon.
Israel’s attacks have killed more than 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza — more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Hamas has ruled Gaza since winning the 2007 election, when Palestinian voters rejected years of corrupt rule by the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Fatah party. Since then, the territory has been under blockade by both Israel and neighboring Egypt, which control the people and goods that enter and exit the territory.
Israel’s onslaught has displaced more than 90% of Gaza’s population, destroyed the majority of homes, hospitals and schools and led to disease and risk of famine.
In November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
At the same time, more than 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military or Israeli settlers in the West Bank, according to regional reports.
In July, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem to be unlawful and said it was obliged to end its presence in the territories “as rapidly as possible.”
One Gazan journalist and writer, Mohammed Mhawish, reported for Al Jazeera during the war until he fled in May, so he could report in exile. Five months earlier, an Israeli airstrike destroyed his home after the military contacted him numerous times, demanding he stop his work, Mhawish told Capital News Service in a phone interview.
“Every word I write, every story I do is a thread of hope, of pain, of loss, of tragedy altogether,” Mhawish said. “It’s a means also to holding on to our place, to our hometown, when we write, when we report, and that’s why we’re getting targeted.”
Israel has not permitted media outlets independent access to Gaza and has destroyed 70 media offices, according to CPJ. It has shut down other media outlets, like Al-Rimawi’s J-Media agency.
On Oct. 16, 2023, Israel shut down J-Media and called it an “illegal organization,” according to MADA, the Ramallah-based Palestine Center for Development and Media Freedom. It also arrested three other J-Media journalists, MADA and CPJ said.
In December, a dozen U.S. senators signed a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging him to prioritize journalists’ safety and access to Gaza.
“The lack of safe working conditions for journalists in Gaza makes it almost impossible to have an accurate understanding of the humanitarian devastation taking place in the territory,” the letter said.
Efforts to Silence Al-Rimawi
Before he turned himself in, Al-Rimawi posted a video from the hospital to his social media accounts, which have amassed more than 264,000 followers.
“The occupation, in time of its war on Gaza, now wants the journalistic and media voice to be absent,” Al-Rimawi said in the video in Arabic and translated by CPJ.
Throughout his career, Al-Rimawi has been arrested numerous times by Israeli and Palestinian authorities. He has spent more than a decade in Israeli prisons, according to his family and the media monitoring network Middle East Monitor. His family believes he is currently held at Israel’s Nafha Prison.
Al-Rimawi’s cousin, Faruk Rimawi, recounted watching from his window in 2021 when Al-Rimawi was previously arrested from his home.
“[Al-Rimawi] is one of the most cheerful people. When you sit with him, you laugh. He is always positive about life,” his cousin, who lives in Turkey, said in a phone interview in Arabic. “Everyone who knows him loves him.”
With his father in prison, Mohammad Al-Rimawi, now 19, has had to balance both college and working to support his mother and four siblings in Ramallah. He only hears news of their father through his lawyer.
He said despite the dangers Al-Rimawi has faced in his journalism career, he continues to do the work because he sees himself as a voice for the Palestinian people.
“He has no problems going through what he does in exchange for our freedom in the end,” Mohammad Al-Rimawi said.