Gaza photojournalist released from Israeli detention says prison guards lied, told him his wife and children were dead

Shadi Abu Sido’s world was shattered in Israeli detention when guards told him his wife and two children had been killed.

“I got hysterical,” the Gaza Palestinian photographer says.

It wasn’t until his release on Monday, part of the US-mediated ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that halted two years of war, that he discovered his loved ones were alive.

His wife, Hanaa Bahlul, raced down the hallway of his family’s house in Khan Younis and leapt into his arms. He spun her in the air as they clung to each other. Abu Sido kissed his children’s cheeks again and again, murmuring “my love” as he held the daughter and son he thought he would never see again.

“I heard her voice, I heard the voice of my children, I was astonished, it cannot be explained, they were alive. I saw my wife and children alive. Imagine amid death-life,” he says.

Abu Sido, a photojournalist, said he was detained at Shifa hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on March 18, 2024.

He was among 1,700 Gazan detainees uninvolved in the October 7, 2023, massacre, who were arrested as unlawful combatants during the war, to go free on Monday as part of the ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

According to Palestinian human rights group Addameer, 2,673 Gazans are detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law — a form of administrative detention.

Reuters says that the IDF and Justice Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.