GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Sometime last year, Hanan Omar, a journalist from Gaza City, sat at a popular outdoor cafe preparing to interview an activist about prisoner affairs. She had no idea that sitting in public would land her in police custody.

“As I was getting ready to start the interview, detectives arrived at the café,” Omar (a pseudonym) told Al-Monitor. “Of course, there were dozens of young men and women [there]. The security officers escorted me out, along with the person they wanted, who happened to be the person I was about to interview. They interrogated me about the nature of my relationship with that person, and I explained that I was a journalist, but nobody listened.”

She explained that although she was simply doing her job, to the security officers her sitting with the activist, a man, constituted “suspicious” activity. Omar said, “The officer actually said to me, if [a man] wanted to approach me and saw me sitting with another man, what would his reaction be?” She was taken by the security officers to one of the city’s police departments on charges of sitting with a man with whom she had no legal ties.

Khalid Mustafa (a pseudonym), a photographer and journalist from Gaza City, commented on how detectives are frequent visitors at the cafe he visits daily to wrap up his work. He said they drop by under various pretexts, such as preventing girls from smoking hookahs.