In early September 2024, Mujahed al-Saadi, a prominent Palestinian journalist, published an eyewitness account of an Israeli raid on Jenin, documenting how soldiers had bulldozed scores of homes, markets and roads in the West Bank city and occupied hospitals, preventing people from receiving medical care.
Saadi had covered countless such raids by Israel Defence Forces in his decade as a journalist for Arabic-language media. But this article, which appeared on the investigative Substack outlet Drop Site News, was translated to English and intended for an international audience.
An editor’s note attached to the piece asserted that IDF soldiers had opened fire on Saadi and other journalists while they were reporting, and that an IDF bulldozer had tried to run them down.
“It’s quite terrifying to have the bulldozer rush at you, for them to shoot at you,” Saadi told Drop Site News. “They were trying to prevent us from doing our coverage.”
Just two weeks later, Israeli soldiers burst into Saadi’s home and took him away.
Then he disappeared into Israel’s shadowy prison system, where he has been held without trial for 15 months, according to Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Drop Site News editor who commissioned Saadi’s article.
Kouddous said in an interview with Capital News Service that the IDF has not released any information about the conditions of Saadi’s imprisonment, or the status of any legal case he might be facing.
“We’re not sure of his condition,” Kouddous said. “We don’t know when he’s getting out.”
Since the Oct.7, 2023, killings and kidnappings in Israel by Hamas militants that touched off the two-year Gaza war, Israel has faced widespread condemnation for what rights groups and the United Nations say are targeted killings of journalists in the Gaza Strip, which is illegal under international laws of war.
But less well reported has been Israel’s imprisonment of more than 50 Palestinian journalists, 22 of whom on what Israeli law calls administrative detention orders, according to the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA), a nongovernmental organization.
For years, administrative detention has allowed the military to hold individuals without the normal legal rights afforded to crime suspects not accused of terrorism. A single order lasts for up to six months but can be renewed indefinitely.
The number of Palestinians in administrative detention has exploded during the Gaza war, rising from 791 in 2022 to 3,563 in 2025, according to data compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
Human rights groups have accused the IDF of using arbitrary detentions as part of a campaign to silence Palestinian dissent and independent media.
“The main targets [for arrest] have tended to be human rights NGOs and media because of the reach they have and their ability to advocate for Palestinians beyond the occupied territories,” said Zaha Hassan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank. Israeli policy “has morphed into a strategy to colonize and to impose an apartheid regime over Palestinians.”
The Israeli Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have been ruled by a carousel of defacto occupiers – Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians – who have curtailed human rights, including independent media.
Islamist groups like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad harass independent journalists as well to comply with their version of events. The Palestinian Authority, which nominally administers the territory, has also grown increasingly authoritarian, according to critics. In 2017, the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas adopted a cybercrime law that, according to press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “limits both freedom of expression and freedom of the press.”
The current war has brought unprecedented violence against Palestinian journalists. The Palestinian territories now rank as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists, according to RSF, with more than 200 killed by the Israeli army since the war’s start. At least 42 of those journalists were “likely killed due to their work,” according to RSF.
Coverage of the war has almost entirely depended on independent and amateur citizen Palestinian journalists, as foreign reporters have been denied entry into the zone.
Even before his most recent arrest, Saadi was no stranger to a prison cell. Establishing himself as a freelance journalist in the West Bank in 2012, Saadi’s work quickly made him a target of both Israeli and Palestinian authorities, according to Kouddous and local media reports.
In 2014, Saadi was briefly arrested by the Palestinian Authority for allegedly insulting a senior official in the ruling Fatah party in a Facebook post, according to the Palestinian media center MADA.
Israeli forces detained him at least twice, in 2016 and 2020, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, while he was covering IDF raids in the enclave, each time spending seven months in jail.
Israeli officials have said they arrested Saadi for involvement in “terrorist activity,” Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported. At the time, the Palestinian media and CPJ accused the IDF of targeting Saadi for his work.
Saadi kept reporting nevertheless.
In 2022, Saadi was present during a raid in Jenin when he witnessed IDF soldiers fatally shoot Palestinian American TV journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose death touched off an international outcry over the IDF’s alleged targeting of noncombatants.
“We tried to rescue Shireen and we couldn’t,” Saadi told CNN shortly after the incident. “Shireen fell while she was wearing press [gear] and even with that, the people who tried to save her were shot at. The targeting was clear against Shireen and against us as journalistic teams.”
Throughout his career, Saadi reported for Arabic-language outlets, including local broadcaster Palestine Today TV and the London-based Al-Araby al-Jadeed. But when intense fighting came to the West Bank, Saadi accepted a commission from Drop Site News to publish an English-language story.
Saadi’s story on the Jenin raid appeared on Sept. 3, 2024.
In the predawn hours of Sept. 19, 2024, Saadi woke at his Jenin home to the sound of soldiers breaking down the door. Before he had time to dress himself, relatives told local media outlets, the soldiers struck Saadi with the butts of their rifles and dragged him to a waiting vehicle. It was the last his family saw of him, according to Kouddous, the Drop Site News editor.
Kouddous accused Israeli authorities of arresting Saadi to stop his reporting, and he criticized the international community for failing to check Israel’s use of nebulous administrative detention orders.
“Israel does it with impunity and no one is holding them accountable,” Kouddous told CNS. “If they’re not going to pay a price for killing a journalist, they’re not going to pay a price for imprisoning the journalist.”