the lives of Palestinian detainees in Israel

During their detention, “they said they had killed our children and our women.” When he saw his children on October 13, “it was a shock,” he says by phone from Gaza.

Chadi Abu Sidu says he was arrested while working at the Al Shifa hospital complex and was first imprisoned in Sde Teiman, a maximum security prison on a military base for Palestinians detained in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

“Almost 100 days of torture” followed, with “hands tied from 5 am to 11 pm, eyes blindfolded” and a ban on speaking, he says.

At the time of his arrest, Al Shifa was the epicenter of the war between Israel and Hamas, where humanitarian organizations accused Israeli forces of committing human rights violations, while the Israeli government accused the Palestinian movement of using this hospital as a command center.

Chadi Abu Sidu was later transferred to the Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank, where, he said, conditions were “unimaginable”. In almost twenty months, he has only had two interviews with his lawyer.

“No charges were brought against me” and “detention was automatically extended” without explanation, he says.