With lost weight and a changed appearance.. The occupation releases journalist Ali Al-Samoudi after a year of administrative detention

Israeli occupation authorities on Thursday released Palestinian journalist Ali Al-Samoudi, 59, a resident of Jenin city in the northern occupied West Bank. The release came after Al-Samoudi spent a full year in administrative detention without a clear charge, where he faced extremely difficult detention conditions.

Human rights sources reported that Al-Samoudi appeared after his release with a completely different appearance than he had before his arrest, due to a severe and sudden weight loss. The sources confirmed that this health deterioration resulted from the systematic starvation policies pursued by the Israeli prison administration against prisoners, in addition to exposure to continuous abuse and torture.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club clarified in a statement that Al-Samoudi was deprived of basic rights, as well as repeated transfers between prisons and the accompanying physical and psychological assaults. The club considered Al-Samoudi's case a reflection of what thousands of prisoners suffer inside cells amid escalating repressive measures for several months.

In his first statement after gaining freedom, journalist Ali Al-Samoudi said that he lost about half of his weight, dropping from 120 kilograms to about 60 kilograms. He described the conditions inside prisons as tragic, noting that prisoners suffer from a severe shortage of food quantities and poor quality, which led to the deterioration of the health of many of them.

Al-Samoudi pointed out in his testimony that he was unable to recognize his facial features in the mirror after his release due to the significant change in his body. He called on prisoners' families and human rights organizations to intensify efforts to support detainees, stressing that they face a complete lack of the most basic human necessities inside detention centers.

Official statistics indicate that Al-Samoudi is one of more than 3,530 administrative detainees held in Israeli prisons without trial. The occupation also still detains more than 40 journalists, including four female journalists, as part of an organized campaign aimed at restricting freedom of opinion and expression and preventing the reporting of what is happening in the Palestinian territories.

Human rights organizations renewed their call to the United Nations and the international community to assume their responsibilities towards the torture and deliberate medical neglect that prisoners are subjected to. They demanded the need to reveal the fate of detainees, especially those who were arrested from the Gaza Strip and face an unknown fate in the absence of international oversight.

It is worth noting that occupation prisons currently hold more than 9,600 Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, who live in harsh conditions that have led to the martyrdom of dozens of them as a result of torture. These violations coincide with the escalation of attacks in the West Bank, which has recorded the martyrdom of 1,154 Palestinians since October 2023.

I lost about half of my weight during the detention period, as it decreased from 120 kilograms to about 60 kilograms as a result of the tragic conditions and starvation policies.