I am Hani Yousef Ibrahim Issa, editor-in-chief of Quds News Net Agency. I was born in the Jabalia Camp and reside in Beit Lahia, where the agency’s office is located. Since Israel’s aggression on the Gaza Strip began fourteen months ago, I have documented every escalation in the war. Even when the orders came for residents in the North to evacuate to Mawasi in southern Gaza, I stayed, documenting this war’s progression into a project of annihilation — a genocide. But here in the North, we are now isolated from the world, living through the IOF’s brutality as all sources of energy and telecommunications are essentially cut off. It has been more than 400 days.
I was detained and tortured by the Israeli forces for the first time on December 7, 2023. I was taken, along with a group of civilians in Beit Lahia, to a detention center at the “Zikim” military base. An Israeli intelligence officer interrogated me about my work.
“You’re a journalist? A communist journalist?” he mocked. “What are you going to write about when you leave? The university where you studied, Al-Azhar, has been bombed. Write about that.”
I responded calmly, “My work is currently halted because of this war, a war that has not even left us with the ability to feed our children. So why are you concerned with my practice of journalism? All I wish for now is to return to my home, before ever returning to my work.”
After the interrogation, I was handcuffed and blindfolded. All of us were stripped down to our underwear and left out in the freezing cold for hours. The soldiers divided us into groups, and we were repeatedly moved around in these clusters. In that chilling darkness, we got to know one another through sound alone, bound together by fear and the cold.
Our eventual release, however, brought about only more humiliation. More than 200 of us were forced to board the Zionist’s military trucks, packed on top of each other like cattle. We were taken to an agricultural area in Beit Lahia known as “Ard Hamdoosh.”
From there, we walked back to our homes barefoot, still stripped down to our underwear. Glass and rubble were scattered across the street, tearing our feet. It would be four kilometers before we approached any inhabited areas. I barely recognized Beit Lahia when we finally got there. The neighborhood’s features had completely changed: Houses had been burned and bombed. The devastation was widespread.
Life since has been incredibly harsh. I repeatedly lost access to any basic necessities required for work: internet connection, electricity, and communication devices like mobile phones or computers. The Israeli bombardment of our homes was continuous, but I managed to stay in the North the entire year until the Israelis began the “Generals’ Plan” — a project intent on ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, depopulating our towns under bombardment, massacres, and starvation. My home was targeted twice. I emerged both times from underneath the rubble. After this our options for shelter narrowed, and we ended up near the Kamal Adwan Hospital.
On the evening of December 6, 2024, almost a year after my initial detention, the hospital was ordered by the IOF to remove anybody who had been displaced to its grounds. My wife and I were forced to evacuate along with seventy others.
We were told that arrangements had been made for us to walk behind the hospital’s ambulances that were transporting the injured from Kamal Adwan to the Baptist Hospital (Al-Ma’madani) in Gaza City. The ambulance driver implored us to remain behind the vehicle so as to avoid being attacked by the IOF. He said he would take us as far as the military checkpoint in the east of Jabalia, known as the “civilian management” checkpoint.
With heavy steps, I walked behind the ambulances with my wife. Before we left, I had tried to convince her to stay in the hospital or one of the houses nearby, but she refused.
“I can’t,” she told me. “I want to live to see my children. I do not have the energy to stay. If you want, stay by yourself.”
“I won’t leave you,” I told her.
The “Civilian Management” checkpoint is little more than a makeshift military roadblock: Two lumps of sand flank a cluster of IOF soldiers. An Israeli barracks site sits adjacent. The ambulances dropped us there, and the soldiers separated the men and older boys from the women and younger children. The youngest were checked for their ages and they, along with the women, were then ordered to continue walking towards Gaza City. We were then moved into two parallel lines, each man separated by about two meters. The soldiers ordered us to strip down to our underwear.
One by one, each man and boy was forced to stand in front of the group, take off his underwear, and turn in a full circle. Each of us watched at a distance, helpless, awaiting our turn for this systemic humiliation. Over and over, the soldiers repeated the same command to the other men:
“Take off your underwear.”
“Turn around, turn around, turn around.”
I had thoughts of running away. But the barrel of their military tank was then aimed towards us, and the fear was too great. I surrendered to this humiliating reality and awaited my turn.
It came, finally, as the sun was setting. I approached the soldiers cautiously, carrying my clothes and my ID card in my arms while a hoard of sniper lasers followed me.
A soldier yelled out, “Take off your clothes! Or do you want us to shoot you?”
Another demanded in Hebrew, “What do you do for work?”
“I work as a journalist,” I replied.
“Where is your equipment?” he asked.
“There’s no equipment; my bag has my clothes and personal things,” I answered.
He ordered me to look at the camera lens of his tablet, and then motioned for me to go to the militarized zone inside the barracks.
“Take off your underwear, and turn around,” a soldier demanded at the gate. I complied.
They told me to cross my arms behind my back in an X-shape and tightened zip ties around my wrists. I marched towards a spot marked with their rifle’s laser when another soldier blindfolded me, and I was forced into darkness. The sounds of their tanks and military vehicles surrounded us. One of the soldiers would aggressively yell out our names and another would move us around the barracks. They beat on the young boys whose screams filled the room. One of them, I remember, pleaded with the soldiers. “I’m sick,” he begged while the others cried out in pain.
We sat like this for twelve hours. I began to lose feeling in my feet, and my hands began to swell. We didn’t know then whether we were going to be released or moved to a detention camp. Eventually the soldiers began untying our zip ties. I then looked for my clothes in the complete darkness and piercing cold.
Once dressed, we were again ordered into a single-file line. One man each at the front and back were given dim, blue-tinged flashlights, and the soldiers commanded us to walk first to Gaza City, and then south.
As we began our march, a soldier warned us: “Whoever trespasses the front of the line will be shot, and whoever lags behind the back of the line will be shot.”
We walked first through Salah al-Din road towards Gaza City. Dim green lights were lined up all along the road; some of us thought these were used as signals for Israeli tanks. Besides them were IOF soldiers — hidden except for the red flare of the lasers emanating from their rifles.
During the walk, my mind was entirely occupied with finding my wife. None of us had any access to a means of communication, and it was only after walking a long and exhausting distance, amidst the pitch darkness and the sound of those drones that never leave Gaza’s skies that we began to feel a sort of reassurance. Lights finally started shining from homes: We had reached an area with residents.
Upon reaching the Shujaiya intersection in eastern Gaza, we headed towards the center of Gaza City. I went with my cousin to Al-Shati’ Camp, where we spent the night in his friend’s home who had been displaced from northern Gaza several months ago.
At the house, I asked for a cell phone to call my wife and try to find out where she was. On the third attempt, she picked up and told me that one of her relatives reached out to her after learning about my detention. He took her from one of the schools where she had sought refuge, in the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza, to a house he had been displaced to further west.
My wife was my partner in suffering. She had insisted on staying by my side in the North despite the martyrdom of her entire family (father, mother, sisters, and their children) and that of my lifelong friend and her cousin along with his whole family. We sent our three children (Fidaa’, Saba, and Yusuf) south to their grandparents out of fear for their lives.
I write to you today with bitterness and pain. I think death would’ve been easier than this humiliation we were put through at the Israeli checkpoint. I haven’t written about other harrowing scenes from this war, like sleeping next to corpses at Kamal Adwan Hospital or treating the wounded amid a shortage of medical supplies — the images taken have done enough to convey these scenes to the world.
The abasement we were put through was not a security measure; it is aimed at degrading our humanity and breaking our spirits, and it cannot be allowed to pass in silence.
We have been stripped of our bodily autonomy and privacy. We were victims of a barbaric display of power. Our bodies were used against us as tools to break our will and humiliate us, both in front of our loved ones and our own selves.
As a Palestinian journalist, I call on the International Federation of Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, and all other international bodies concerned with the protection of those working in journalism and media to provide and ensure real protection that preserves our human dignity as Palestinian journalists.
We work in unfathomable conditions and are constantly targeted, whether through direct airstrikes or arbitrary detention during the many consecutive Israeli aggressions. As soon as the Israeli forces know that you work in journalism or media, they will do all that is in their power to deliberately humiliate you and subject you to long and degrading interrogations.
What I endured at the Israeli military checkpoint east of Jabalia was much worse than a physical violation. It was a systemic stripping of my humanity and psyche. They treated us as if we were just bodies without souls or value. The soldiers intended to humiliate us all. Their goal was to destroy our fundamental human essence, to erase any feeling of dignity or freedom.
I write these words after my human dignity was violated by the IOF at the military checkpoint near Jabalia Camp in the north of Gaza. I write these words to express the enormity of the pain and suffering I’ve endured with the hope that my voice reaches the world, that everyone understands the magnitude of this catastrophe, and that this may be a means of reclaiming the parts of my humanity that I have lost.
This was one of the various forms of physical and symbolic violence that goes beyond the bounds of occupation to take our humanity from us. Our displacement from the North was merely an opportunity for them to commit a much bigger crime. It was a clear attempt to impose a state of total oppression and demoralization. Dying in an airstrike would have been easier than living through such dehumanization.
الصحفي هاني عيسى
رئيس تحرير وكالة قدس نت للأنباء
14-12-2024