It was 19 days after his arrest by the Israeli army in Tulkarem, in the north of the occupied West Bank, on February 23, 2024. Sami Al-Sa'i, a 47-year-old Palestinian journalist, had just been transferred from a military base to Megiddo prison. "The guards told me to undress and throw my clothes in a trash bin," recounted the father of six in front of reporters on Wednesday, January 14. "They asked, 'Are you with Hamas? Are you a journalist?' The beating started. They hit every part of my body," he said. "They took me to another room. They told me to kneel down. I thought they wanted to humiliate me. They beat me again."
At that moment, according to his account, the detainee was blindfolded. The guards held him down completely. "They tried to force something hard into my anus," he said. "I resisted, I tensed my muscles with all my strength. But it was too painful, they penetrated me deeply. The pain was terrible. (…) They did it again." The man heard his guards laugh and then smoke a cigarette. They then carried him into a shared cell. For several days, he cleaned the wound with toilet paper.
Al-Sa'i spent 16 months in "administrative detention," a seemingly neutral term referring to incarceration without charge or any means of defense, a practice that Israeli authorities have used extensively against thousands of West Bank residents since October 7, 2023. "They wanted me to collaborate with them, and I refused," he explained. On top of the rape he said he suffered, he also endured regular beatings, humiliation and food deprivation. The journalist lost 30 kilos during his detention. He was released on June 10, 2025, without explanation or charge.
Al-Sa'i stressed that he had never imagined the intensity of the abuse, even though he had already been detained twice by Israel, for four months in 1997 and nine months in 2016, accused of activism in support of Palestine. In 2018, he also gave testimony to the NGO Human Rights Watch about the violence he had suffered in Palestinian prisons. That report also revealed the extent of torture carried out by Hamas in Gaza and by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.