Samoudi says guards beat prisoners, neglected sick inmates

Palestinian journalist recounts Israeli food rations after losing 130 pounds in jail

Ali Samoudi, who was released last week without charge after yearlong administrative detention, says he never questioned about sraeli allegation of ties to Islamic JIhad

A Palestinian journalist recently released from one year in Israeli jail, where he was held without charge, recounted the severe conditions he said prisoners undergo in a Thursday interview with CNN.

Ali Samoudi lost 130 pounds while in prison and was barely recognizable to family and friends after he was released on April 30.

Samoudi was held by Israel using a controversial legal tool called administrative detention, which allows authorities to indefinitely keep a suspect in custody without charge, based on covert intelligence information.

While some in administrative detention are eventually charged, others — including Samoudi — are not.

Defense Minister Israel Katz barred the use of the practice against Jewish suspects last year, and it is now only employed against some 4,000 Palestinians and a small number of Arab Israelis, leading to charges of discrimination by Israeli authorities.

Samoudi, in the CNN interview, said prisoners are given small rations of food each day.

He said breakfast consisted of one spoon of labneh and a quarter spoon of jam; lunch is four spoons of rice, two slices of cucumber and one spoon of white beans; while dinner is two spoons of hummus, one spoon of tahini and a hard-boiled egg.

Samoudi did not see how much weight he lost until his release, saying he was banned from seeing a mirror. “I felt something dreadful. My situation was difficult, and I understood that, but I did not imagine it was to this extent,” he said.

A recent report from Israel’s own Public Defender’s Office determined that Palestinian security detainees held in Israeli prisons have suffered from severe and systematic violence from prison guards, deprivation of food, and medical neglect, while also having been subjected to unsanitary conditions that caused and exacerbated outbreaks of disease in the prisons.

“It was true hell. Prison today is hell in every sense of the word. Everything they practice with us was punishment and revenge,” Samoudi said.

“One time after I returned from a visit with my lawyer, they threw us on the ground face-first and they started hitting us. An Israeli officer stepped on my head to pressed my face into the ground for four minutes, as I suffocated,” he alleged.

In another incident, Samoudi said a 22-year-old inmate was refused medical treatment by Israeli guards.

“He got sick at night, and we asked them to take him to the clinic, but they refused… In the morning, we asked again. [but they refused]… We brought him out to the yard on his mattress, but they still didn’t take him,” he charged. “He died in front of us.”

CNN identified the man as Loay Faisal Turkman from Jenin. He was also held without charge.

By the end of 2025, the number of Palestinians who died in Israeli custody since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the ensuing Gaza war rose to nearly 100 people, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

The Israel Prison Service did not respond to a request for comment on Samoudi’s detention or why he was held for so long if he was never charged. It also declined to comment on Turkman’s case.

IPS, in the past, has denied allegations of mistreatment and insisted inmates are treated according to international law.

However, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose office oversees the IPS, routinely boasts of having worsened the conditions of Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli custody, claiming they were too comfortable before he took over three years ago.

Samoudi was shot in 2022 by Israeli forces during the same incident in his colleague, Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by troops. The Israel Defense Forces later concluded “with very high likelihood” that a single soldier opened fire after “misidentifying her.”

CNN said that when it asked the IDF why Samoudi was detained in early 2025, the military responded that he identified as a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group and was suspected of having transferred funds to the organization.

Samoudi called the allegation “bullshit” and said he was never questioned on the matter while held in detention.

“My arrest is part of the Israeli war against the Palestinian press and media to silence my voice, to block my camera, to break my pen, and to thus prevent me from practicing my right guaranteed by all laws and international norms — the freedom of the press,” he claimed.

Thirty-three Palestinian journalists are currently being held in Israeli prisons, the vast majority in administrative detention, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Only two other countries — China and Myanmar — detained more journalists than Israel in 2025, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Israel has rejected allegations that it deliberately targets journalists and asserts that many of the ostensible members of the press who have been killed throughout the war were, in fact, combatants.

In some cases, the IDF has provided documentation seized from terror groups in Gaza that list the journalists as fighters for those organizations.

A study published in December by an Israeli research center claimed that 60% of 266 press workers killed since Hamas launched the war with an invasion and massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023, either strongly identified with or were members of Gaza-based terror groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with many working as propagandists.

Nevertheless, journalists enjoy protection under international humanitarian law until they take up arms and participate directly in hostilities, in which case they become a legitimate target.

Asked if he was scared about being rearrested, Samoudi told CNN that he was, but that being a journalist is his life’s mission and that he plans to keep reporting.