Shadi Abu Seido reaching out of a bus window as he was being released. Photo provided by the family

On October 13, 2025, as many as 1,968 Palestinian detainees tasted freedom through a prisoner exchange with the Israeli occupation. Among them were 1,718 detainees who had been imprisoned during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They returned to their ravaged towns and villages with stories of physical torture, psychological brutality, and despair at being ripped away from their families. Upon their release, they didn’t know what awaited them in a Gaza that had been destroyed. 

Haitham Salem was arrested on Nov. 17, 2024, at the Civil Administration checkpoint in Jabalia, while he and his family were moving to a “safe area.” The Israeli occupation had directed thousands of displaced families to designated safe areas but at the checkpoints they were humiliated and terrorized, and some were kidnapped. Salem was among the hundreds who were arrested there. He tearfully bid his wife and four children farewell, urging them to take care of one another until he returned.

Almost immediately, Salem was subjected to torture. Israeli soldiers brutally beat him and the other detainees and stubbed out cigarettes all over their naked bodies. They cursed them with vile language and humiliated them by forcing them to imitate animal sounds. When Salem asked an Israeli soldier about the charges against him, the soldier shouted: “Shut up! You’re here just to fill the quota.”

While he spent almost a year imprisoned, Salem describes the nine months he spent in the notorious Sde Teiman and Ofer prisons as the harshest and most unbearable, where he endured relentless physical and psychological torture. He was forced to kneel with his head down all the time, given stale food, and denied basic hygiene. “There was a time,” he says, “when my body didn’t stop bleeding for four days straight because of the severe beatings.” Detainees never received medical care until they were on the verge of death. 

Haitham Salem with his children Baraa Salem and Eman Salem on Eid al-Fitr, before he was detained by Israel. Photo provided by Haitham Salem

The long-awaited moment

Salem learned about his release four days before it happened. He eagerly anticipated the moment he would see his family. “I was so desperate to see them after nearly a year apart,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep because of my excitement.” Knowing that his daughter Layan’s birthday was approaching, Salem secretly crafted a bracelet with a ring as a gift for her.

A frail Salem stepped out of the detainees’ bus desperately searching for his wife and children. However, none of them were there to greet him. Salem’s wife and all four of his children had been killed in the destruction of Gaza. He was too shocked to grasp what had happened; he kept asking one of his relatives to call his wife, who, of course, never answered.

He broke down, his legs unable to carry him. A relative had to take him away in a wheelchair while he wept inconsolably. “It was unbearably hard to stand alone, watching other freed detainees reunite with their families. I had spent every moment of the past year dreaming about when I would see them again. I lost them forever.”

Holding up the bracelet he made for his little Layan, Salem tearfully added, “I wish I had never been released, never found out they were gone.”

For no reason at all, Israeli forces had arrested and tortured Salem. He questions a world that would allow his wife and four little children to be slaughtered, taking them away from him forever without even a chance to say goodbye. They had done nothing to deserve their fate. 

Reporting as a crime

Journalist Shadi Abu Seido, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was reporting to the world from inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City when Israeli occupation forces broke into the hospital and arrested him in March 2024.

In the first hours of his detention, Abu Seido was completely stripped and brutally beaten. He suffered broken bones and bled from all parts of his body. He was taken to Sde Teiman Prison, where he endured the harshest 100 days of his life—he even wished for death to escape the torment. Abu Seido portrayed the agony of sitting on his knees, his head bent down in a fixed position, blindfolded with his hands tightly shackled. He said, “You’re not even allowed to move your head, your lips or straighten your back. If you did any of that, excruciating punishment awaited you.”

Food was either not provided or given in almost negligible amounts, and the detainees were not allowed to attend to their basic personal needs, such as relieving themselves when needed. “They gave us a small, moldy piece of bread as food, and for the restroom—can you imagine they only gave us two minutes a day, while we were still handcuffed?” Abu Seido recounted.

Abu Seido described a time when an Israeli officer physically tortured him, while bragging about having killed many journalists. The officer said to Abu Seido, “Even though I didn’t kill you, I killed your camera lens, and I will kill you, too.” With that, he struck Abu Seido in his eye, causing severe bleeding. Abu Seido’s lawyer Sahar Francis was there and witnessed the incident, promising to report it to human rights organizations. Abu Seido, however, responded bitterly: “Or to animal rights organizations, because even if we were animals, they wouldn’t have treated us like this.”

Dead or alive?

In Abu Seido’s first moments of freedom, he was utterly stunned to see his family. Israeli officers had convinced him that his parents, wife, and children had been killed in an airstrike, that he had no one left and that Gaza had been completely destroyed. Says Abu Seido, “I started screaming, asking them, ‘Why did you kill them? What did they ever do to you? Even me—what did I do to you?’” The officer replied coldly, “Let journalism help you now.” Abu Seido said he couldn’t sleep and that his mental state had deteriorated so much that he believed he had “completely lost his sanity.”

Despite this, Abu Seido held onto a small glimmer of hope that his family might be OK—and they were. “The moment I saw them alive before my eyes, I hugged them, I had a feeling I cannot describe, a joy that is beyond words!” he recalled.

Shadi Abu Seido, after release from prison, with his children Rakan and Rivan Abu Seido. Photo: Hanaa Bahlool

Abu Seido’s words echo those of many other detainees who were deceived into believing their homes had been bombed, their families killed, and Gaza erased. This psychological torture left them deeply traumatized, emerging in shock barely able to comprehend that their families were still alive or that Gaza still existed.

Abu Seido concluded his testimony in tears, repeating a message that other detainees entrusted him to deliver: “Please, tell the world—tell everyone, and every decision-maker—about us and about our pain. Tell them that we are dying slowly from torture, day and night. Tell them that we are starving. Tell them to get us out, at any cost.” Abu Seido deeply yearns to see an end to the detainees’ suffering in Israel’s “graves for the living.”

Salem’s and Abu Seido’s stories of trauma and tragedy are manifestations of the Israeli occupation’s policy of collective punishment, a deliberate strategy targeting defenseless civilians. Salem was arrested and tortured to “fill the quota,” while Abu Seido’s “crime” was telling the world what was happening in Gaza.

Their narratives are small glimpses into the suffering of thousands of Palestinian detainees who have been or remain in Israeli prisons. It’s impossible to convey the extent of their pain in words. Each one carries a harrowing experience of physical torture, psychological abuse, loss, grief and separation. Only some find an end to their nightmares, while thousands are still held hostage and still waiting.

The world must know of their stories and stop the Israeli occupation now.

This article is co-published with Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.