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Healthcare workers are protected under international law yet hundreds
were detained during the war. Now, some of Gaza’s most senior doctors
have spoken of the violence and abuse they say they faced
More than 160 Gazan medics held in Israeli prisons amid reports of
torture
This investigation was carried out in collaboration between ARIJ and
The Guardian.
To read the investigation in its English version, click
here.
Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on
a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in
central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.
“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,”
he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr
Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating
began.”
Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa says he was
dragged from the operating room before being handcuffed, blindfolded
and stripped.
He was then put in a military truck with other doctors, nurses and
medical staff and driven away from the hospital. Less than 24 hours
later he was in a detention facility in Israel, beginning what he
describes as months of brutal and constant violence and abuse.
“There were no rules,” he says.
During interrogations, he says he was tortured and beaten. “They would
throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other
opened my ear and poured water inside,” he says.
“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take
a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I
was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face,
pinned it down and kept scrubbing.”
Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth: “They have no humanity.”
They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside.
Under international law,
healthcare workers like Abu Ajwa should be protected from attacks by
warring parties and be allowed to continue providing medical care to
all who need it.
Yet by the time the January ceasefire came into effect, more than
1,000 medical staff across Gaza had been killed and many hospitals
bombed to rubble – attacks which a UN Human Rights Council commission
concluded amounted to war crimes.
Hundreds more medical staff who survived the airstrikes and ground
assaults were arrested, illegally transferred across the border and
disappeared into Israeli prisons, including dozens of doctors.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 297 doctors, nurses,
paramedics and other healthcare workers from Gaza were detained by
Israel during the war.
Palestinian medical NGO Healthcare Workers Watch says it believes the
number is slightly higher and that it has verified that 339 healthcare
workers from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military, with at
least 160 still inside Israeli prison facilities.
In interviews with the Guardian and the Arab Reporters for
Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), eight of Gaza’s most senior doctors
have given harrowing testimonies of the torture, beatings, starvation
and humiliation they say they suffered during months of detention.
All of those interviewed say they were targeted because they were
doctors. Most were arrested inside hospitals as they worked; others
were taken from ambulances or detained at checkpoints after being
identified as healthcare workers. All those doctors interviewed were
detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which grants the
Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza they say
might pose a security threat.
Some, including Abu Ajwa, believe they were singled out for extreme
violence by prison guards and interrogators because they were doctors.
“One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I
was a senior consultant surgeon they should work hard to make sure
that I lost [the use of my hands] and became unable to perform
surgery,” he says.
He says he was handcuffed for 24 hours a day and interrogators used
planks with chains to restrain his hands for hours at a time. “They
said they wanted to make sure I could never return to work.”
None of the senior doctors interviewed say they were given an
explanation for their detention. All were released without charge
after months of imprisonment.
The UN Human Rights Office said the mass detention of healthcare
workers has had a catastrophic impact on civilians, denying injured
and sick patients – as well as junior medical staff – access to the
decades of medical skills of senior medics and has been a clear
contributing factor in the almost total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare
system.
“Israel must immediately release all those held arbitrarily, including
medical staff, and end all practices that amount to enforced
disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment,” the UN said in a
statement given to the Guardian. “Those responsible for crimes under
international law must be held to account.”
Article 8, Rome statute
When I told them my name, they pointed their weapons at me and their laser [sights] at my head and chest and I was immediately detained … as if they were waiting for me, as if they had seized a big prize
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital in northern
Gaza, was arrested at a checkpoint while travelling with a convoy of
patients in ambulances after the Israeli army told him to evacuate the
hospital in November 2023.
“When I told them my name, they pointed their weapons at me and their
laser [sights] at my head and chest and I was immediately detained …
as if they were waiting for me, as if they had seized a big prize,” he
says.
“They beat me with rifle butts and chairs,” he says. “After that, they
poured sand over my head and shoved dirt into my mouth.
“I was on the floor on my knees with a blindfold and they were beating
me … after this I was put in a vehicle, myself and many others piled
on top of each other in a humiliating and degrading way,” he says.
“Everyone was screaming, everyone was crying out ‘we don’t know where
we’re going.’ The beating was constant.”
All of the doctors interviewed by the Guardian and ARIJ reported the
same pattern of identification, detention, transfer to Israel and
incarceration, and then being moved multiple times between Israeli-run
prisons during their captivity.
In these facilities they say they were subjected to terrifying and
inhumane treatment including being constantly beaten and kept in
stress positions for hours at a time and having loud music played
constantly to prevent them from sleeping.
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in
detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” says Abu
Selmia.
“I am talking about being clubbed, being beaten with rifle butts and
being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal
hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet
paper … I saw people who were dying there.
“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are
just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was
beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without
torture.”
We were stripped naked; it was cold, and they deliberately sprayed us with cold water.
In their testimonies, the doctors say they were also denied food and
water, with some forced to eat toothpaste for lack of anything else.
They said they were not allowed to wash or change their clothes,
sometimes for months at a time.
Dr Mahmoud Abu Shehada, head of orthopaedic surgery at Nasser
hospital, was arrested at work on 16 February 2024. “All the medical
staff were told to leave. We [were] lined up between the
administration building and the old Nasser building,” he says.
“We were subjected to severe beatings from Friday afternoon to the
early hours of Saturday morning. It was a brutal night of assault and
abuse. We were stripped naked; it was cold, and they deliberately
sprayed us with cold water.”
Abu Shehada spent around three months in different detention centres,
where he says he suffered “daily humiliations and torture” before
being transferred to Israel’s desert Negev prison.
“In Negev prison, the detainees were suffering from skin diseases,
scabies and severe infections with pus and discharge on the skin,” he
says.
“After a while the infection spread to us. Weakness and fatigue took
over to the point where many of us could barely stand.”
“It was not just the beatings [but] the way they treated us like we were not human,” he says. “In Nafha prison, they kept telling us to howl like dogs.”
Dr Bassam Miqdad, head of orthopaedic surgery at the European hospital
in Gaza, was detained after being stopped at a military checkpoint and
spent seven months in Israeli prisons.
“There were Israeli nurses and doctors there but they wouldn’t even
look at you,” he says. “I saw people with broken limbs and the guards
would pull them around. They would ask, ‘where does it hurt?’ and then
beat you on that injury.”
Miqdad said he found it very difficult to recount the violence and
humiliation he says he was subjected to in Israeli prisons.
“It was not just the beatings [but] the way they treated us like we
were not human,” he says. “In Nafha prison, they kept telling us to
howl like dogs.”
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian associate professor of
surgery, who volunteered as a doctor in Gaza during the early stages
of the war, says the psychological impact of the “performative” nature
of the humiliation and torture of senior medical staff in prisons is
“beyond devastating”.
“These are some of the most revered, most respected and senior members
of their communities,” he says. “It is nothing short of a deliberate
attempt to subjugate and violate the whole of Gazan society.”
To date, two of Gaza’s most senior doctors have died in Israeli
detention. Dr Iyad al-Rantisi, a consultant obstetrician and
gynaecologist at Kamal Adwan hospital, died at Shikma prison.
Dr Adnan al-Bursh, head of the orthopaedic department at al-Shifa
hospital, died shortly after being transferred to Ofer prison in April
2024, with former detainees claiming that he died from torture and had
suffered severe sexual violence in the hours before his death.
Reports of torture, violence and psychological abuse of healthcare
workers have been verified by the UN and published in reports by
organisations such as HWW, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human
Rights Israel.
In a HWW report from October 2024, healthcare workers who had been
locked inside Israeli detention facilities gave testimonies of being
electrocuted, hung by their arms from ceilings, being sexually
assaulted and having their genitals mutilated.
A prisoner … had a baton inserted into him
A doctor told the Guardian and ARIJ that he witnessed sexual assaults
while in Israeli detention and tried to help treat a healthcare worker
who had been raped by prison guards.
“A prisoner … had a baton inserted into him,” said Dr Khaled Serr, a
surgeon at Nasser hospital, who was detained in Israeli prisons for
more than six months before being released without charge.
“The assault was so violent that it caused severe muscle tears in his
rectum. Even after his release, he continues to suffer. We performed
multiple surgeries on him, but they have not been successful.”
Prof Nick Maynard, a senior surgical consultant at Oxford hospitals
who worked in hospitals in Gaza during the war, said the arbitrary
detention of hundreds of medical staff in Israeli prisons set a
“chilling” precedent.
“We have just witnessed a war in which hundreds of medical staff,
including some of Gaza’s most experienced medical staff, are dragged
away from their patients and thrown in prisons for months at a time
and tortured with impunity in breach of the Geneva conventions and
other humanitarian laws,” he says.
“It is a deliberate attempt to terrorise, hollow out and disable an
already depleted and traumatised healthcare workforce. It will have
inevitably led to the deaths of many civilians,” the professor says.
Israel has defended its attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system by
claiming hospitals were being used by Hamas as military command or
operation centres.
Under international law, healthcare facilities can lose their
protected status and become military targets if they are used for acts
“harmful to the enemy”.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said: “If
these allegations were verified, this would raise serious concerns
that Palestinian armed groups were using the presence of civilians to
intentionally shield themselves from attack, which would amount to a
war crime.
“However, insufficient information has so far been made available to
substantiate these allegations, which have remained vague and broad,
and in some cases appear contradicted by publicly available
information.
The Guardian put all the doctors’ allegations relating to their
detention to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which did not respond
to the individual cases but provided a general statement in which it
said it was “operating to restore security to the citizens of Israel,
to bring home the hostages, and to achieve the objectives of the war
while operating by international law.
“During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, suspects of terrorist
activities were arrested. The relevant suspects have been taken for
further detention and questioning in Israel. Those who are not
involved in terrorist activity are released back to the Gaza Strip as
soon as possible.”
The IDF says that it provides each detainee with clothing, a mattress,
regular food and drink, and that they have access to medical care. It
said that handcuffing of detainees occurs in accordance with IDF
policies. It was aware of incidents where people had died in detention
and that investigations were conducted for each of these deaths.
“The IDF acts in accordance with Israeli and international law in
order to protect the rights of the detainees held in the detention and
questioning facilities,” it said.
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya
For the families of those doctors who have disappeared into detention,
the absence of information about their loved ones is a daily agony.
In December, the Israeli authorities faced international condemnation
for the arrest of paediatrician Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal
Adwan hospital in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, who was last seen in
Israeli drone footage in his white coat walking through the rubble of
his hospital towards a line of Israeli tanks. His family say he was
held in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp. The Israeli
authorities say they suspect him of being a Hamas militant.
A lawyer representing Abu Safiya was last week allowed to visit the
doctor in Ofer prison for the first time and said Abu Safiya had been
tortured, beaten and denied medical treatment.
I have so many plans for us to do together once I am out of prison.
“We are deeply worried about his fate as he was already injured [when
he was detained],” says his son Elyas Abu Safiya, who has been
campaigning for his release. “We are living in a state of shock.”
Dr Ahmad Mhanna, head of al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza, has been
in Israeli detention for more than one year without charge.
Last November, Mhanna was able to dictate a letter to his family.
In it, he tells his wife: “I miss you so much and I am waiting for the
moment I can see you and the children. I have so many plans for us to
do together once I am out of prison.
“I want you to stay strong. I know the burden is heavy but you can
handle it, I have complete faith in you. I love you very much.”
Since he was released from detention, Abu Ajwa has not managed to fix
his broken teeth but has gone back to work in Gaza’s shattered
healthcare system.
“As for the interrogator who was determined to make me lose sensation
in my hands, I say: ‘no matter what you do … I am a doctor, and I will
practice my profession. I will always continue, until my last breath,
to be in the operating theatre.”
Additional reporting by Kaamil Ahmed, Zarifa Abou Qoura and Aseel
Mousa
This investigation was completed with support from ARIJ