The Committee to Protect Journalists released its 2025 annual prison census in late January 2026, ranking Israel as the third-worst jailer of journalists in the world — with 29 Palestinian journalists behind bars as of December 1, accounting for 9 percent of all imprisoned journalists globally. The total number of journalists imprisoned worldwide exceeded 300 for the fifth consecutive year.

“These record-setting numbers reflect growing authoritarianism and escalating numbers of armed conflicts worldwide,” the CPJ said. “Often, journalists are held under cruel and life-threatening conditions — ‘a cemetery of the living,’ as one freed Palestinian prisoner described it.”

The majority of journalists are being held in administrative detention — without charge, without trial, on security grounds that Israeli authorities are not required to disclose or defend in open court. The CPJ census complements a separate CPJ special report published in February 2026 that documented, through the testimony of 59 Palestinian journalists interviewed after release, the systematic torture that occurs inside Israeli detention facilities: beatings, electroshock, stress positions, denial of sleep, sexual violence including rape, starvation averaging 23.5 kilograms of weight loss per prisoner, and “disco rooms” where loud music was played continuously for days to cause psychological breakdown.

The 29 journalists currently behind bars are those whose detention has been confirmed. At least 265 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023 — the largest journalist death toll in any conflict in modern recorded history. Those who were not killed and not imprisoned were left to cover the destruction of their own communities, the deaths of their colleagues, and the elimination of the infrastructure of news itself, with no international press access permitted to independently verify what they were reporting.

Israel has presented its press restrictions as security measures. The CPJ’s census, placed alongside the death toll and the torture documentation, tells a different story: a systematic effort to eliminate the witnesses.