Warning: Story contains graphic, disturbing photos.
Palestinian health care workers detained by the Israeli military are revealing the horrifying, and in some cases deadly, abuse and torture they say they faced at the hands of soldiers while in custody ― further deteriorating Gaza’s health care system that’s already crumbling under Israel’s nearly yearlong siege.
A report published Monday by Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that reports on crises around the world, included testimony from doctors, nurses and paramedics who said they faced humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing, blindfolding and denial of medical care while in Israeli custody. These specific health care workers, now released, also described torture that included rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces, and inhumane living conditions for the general prison population. Their testimonies are consistent with other reports about Israel’s inhumane treatment of detainees.
“The Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinian health care workers has continued in the shadows and needs to immediately stop,” Balkees Jarrah, HRW’s acting Middle East director, said in a statement earlier this week. “The torture and other ill-treatment of doctors, nurses and paramedics should be thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, including by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
Israeli officials have denied inhumane treatment of detainees, maintaining that the prisoners are members of Hamas. In rare cases, the military launches an investigation into itself or into individual soldiers, which historically has not resulted in accountability.
Israel’s targeting of Palestinian health care workers shot up after soldiers launched its military offensive in Gaza as a response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants who killed about 1,200 and took hundreds hostage, about 100 of whom remain in captivity. The Israeli military has since killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza and decimated the strip while allegedly torturing its captives in shadowy military bases ― actions that the international community has largely described as genocidal.
The Degradation In Israel’s Arrests Of Health Care Workers
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Between March and June of this year, HRW interviewed eight Palestinian health care workers in Gaza who were taken captive by Israeli forces between November and December of last year and detained without charge for some time between seven days and five months. The organization said it also spoke with seven people who witnessed Israeli forces arrest health care workers trying to do their job.
“We’re just health care workers. … We’re not doing anything out of the ordinary,” Dr. Majed Jaber, who is based in the al-Mawasi area while volunteering at Emirati Hospital, said on a Wednesday call with reporters and other Gaza health care workers.
All of the workers who testified in the report said Israeli soldiers never informed them of why they were being detained, but that for weeks those soldiers threatened them with indefinite imprisonment, rape and murdering their families unless they confessed to being members of Hamas.
“The world was spinning around, and I fainted. They hit me with batons. I kept fainting and hallucinating,” Walid Khalili, a 36-year-old paramedic and ambulance driver for the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, told the human rights group. “He kept asking me about the hostages, and moving Hamas hostages, and where I was on Oct. 7. With every question I was electro-shocked to wake me up. He told me to confess and ‘we will stop torturing you.’”
Khalili testified that he was dispatched in November to rescue four men in Gaza City, only to see Israeli forces execute them “in cold blood.” He said he was then beaten, zip-tied, blindfolded and forced to publicly strip in the cold before soldiers took him to an open area, where they doused him in gasoline, threatened to set him on fire and drove a military vehicle directly toward him in an attempt to terrify him into saying he is a Hamas member.
Dr. Khalid Hamoudeh said he faced similar treatment from Israeli forces after they arrested him in December at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia. The doctor told HRW that he and about 50 fellow health care workers were made to sit separately from other Palestinian detainees. A photo that Israel’s Channel 12 widely circulated at the time ― and whose location was first identified by open-source researcher FDov before being confirmed later by HRW ― showed 34-year-old Hamoudeh and several other men shirtless and bound in front of a soldier, while hundreds of detained men behind them sat in a guarded large pit.
The Humiliation, Abuse And Torture In Israel’s Camps
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The health care workers told HRW that Israeli forces took them to detention facilities like the Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert and the Ashkelon prison, or forcibly transferred them to the Anatot military base near East Jerusalem and the Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank.
Khalili said he was detained for 20 days at Sde Teiman, a base in southern Israel that has come under fire after multiple investigations by human rights groups and news outlets reported that the site is part of a network of Israeli torture camps for Palestinian captives. The paramedic described the camp “like a warehouse” where Israeli forces suspended him and dozens of other Palestinian detainees by their metal cuffs from chains attached to the ceiling. He and other detainees also had to wear adult diapers and a garment and headband attached to wires for electrocution, according to the HRW report.
Israeli soldiers took Khalili in for interrogation every three days, forcing him to ingest what he believed was a psychoactive drug before questioning and beating, he said. After experiencing weeks of violence so severe that he required a wheelchair, Khalili was transferred for more than a month of additional detention at al-Naqab prison, where he said he witnessed a man visibly “bleeding from his bottom” because multiple soldiers raped him with an assault rifle.
Conditions at the camps are “not even fit for animals,” testified Dr. Eyad Abed, a 50-year-old surgeon who worked at Indonesian Hospital before he was taken captive. He said he and other detainees “had no choice” but to fill a garbage bag with water and drink from it.
“My wrists hurt so much, they felt paralyzed and numb. I cried so much, I couldn’t take the pain.”
– Khader Abu Nada, formerly detained nurse at Beit Hanoun Hospital in Gaza
In November, Israeli forces arrested Khader Abu Nada, a 30-year-old nurse at northern Gaza’s Beit Hanoun Hospital, while he was evacuating to the south with his family. For the duration of his eight-day detention at the Anatot camp, he said he was forced to work as a “shawish” ― a slang term in Arabic that means “servant” or “subordinate” ― and escort detainees to the interrogation room. Abu Nada told HRW that he would cry while accompanying the detainees “because I’m the one bringing them to this torture.”
Abu Nada said he himself faced abuse before soldiers appointed him as a shawish, getting beaten during his first interrogation by a military commander who also threatened to rape him with an “electric stick” if he didn’t confess to being affiliated with Hamas. The commander then ordered another soldier to tighten Abu Nada’s handcuffs and drag him to a field.
“My wrists hurt so much, they felt paralyzed and numb. I cried so much, I couldn’t take the pain,” said Abu Nada, adding that his wrists eventually turned black, and he feared long-term damage. “I still feel pain in my hands. My hands are weak, and I have no strength to hold or carry anything.”
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According to Physicians for Human Rights Israel, prolonged physical restraint like handcuffs can cause extreme pain and lead to permanent nerve damage that prevents the restrained person from being able to use their hands. In some cases, cuffing can even lead to death.
Hamoudeh was also forced to serve as a shawish during his 22 days at Sde Teiman, seeing between 10 and 20 detainees with medical conditions.
The soldiers “threw this responsibility at me, but without proper medical equipment and facilities,” the doctor said in the report. “I was terrified some would die. … The shawish before me told me that three detainees died during his time.”
Whistleblowers told CNN earlier this year that soldiers would appoint some Palestinians as shawishes after they were no longer suspected of Hamas affiliation, implying that those detainees were being held for no reason other than to forcibly assist the military. The military denied unnecessarily holding detainees to the outlet.
The Detention And Death Of Health Workers Amid Gaza’s Crumbling Health Systems
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The Israeli militaryreportedly had been conducting a criminal investigation into 48 Palestinians who since Oct. 7 were killed while in Israeli custody, Haaretz reported in June. That number includes Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon and orthopedics chief at al-Shifa Hospital who died in April, and Dr. Eyad al-Rantisi, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital’s women’s health center.
“Dr. Adnan was in pain from the beatings. He was also punished. He had visible blunt trauma, and he had trouble breathing,” Hamoudeh said of seeing him among the five detained doctors Israeli soldiers brought in December. “What happened to him, happened to many. There’s clear medical neglect.”
Since October 2023, at least 259 Palestinian health care workers have been unlawfully detained by Israeli forces, with more than 30 accounts of torture and abuse as well as 35 cases of missing workers, according to the nonprofit Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine. The group’s latest update in June also reports that at least 541 Palestinian health care workers have been killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7.
“Really it’s unfortunate ― because it’s reflective of a much greater racism and injustice that’s been going on for decades ― but foreign workers are not the ones being detained and tortured,” Dr. Tanya Haj Hassan, an American pediatrician who has worked extensively in Gaza, said on Wednesday. “It’s Palestinian health care workers that are being detained and tortured.”
“Yes, everybody is scared. … At the same time, the biggest thing that’s preventing medical personnel from entering Gaza is the Israeli military and the Israeli government with Israeli policies.”
– Dr. Tarek Loubani, medical director of aid group Glia
Doctors, nurses and paramedics for months have tried to relay to the international community the dire state of hospitals and the desperate attempts to treat patients suffering from diseases or bomb-related wounds with few medical personnel and even fewer medical equipment, all while facing repeated evacuation orders and Israeli military raids.
Despite the growing dangers, doctors and some medical aid workers say they are not deterred from carrying out their duties in occupied Palestinian land.
“We are trying our best to get medical personnel in. These are medical personnel who understand the risks, who have worked in other high-risk situations and who want to help,” said Dr. Tarek Loubani, the medical director of Canadian aid group Glia who worked at al-Shifa Hospital. “I mean, we’re watching an active genocide, of course they want to help.”
“Yes, everybody is scared. Yes, nobody is going in there because they want to die,” he continued on Wednesday. “At the same time, the biggest thing that’s preventing medical personnel from entering Gaza is the Israeli military and the Israeli government with Israeli policies. That is what’s stopping our teams from entering.”
The threats to Palestinian health care have seeped into the occupied West Bank, which just faced its largest attack by Israel since 2002 during the Second Intifada. Soldiers are closing roads, invading hospitals, blocking ambulances and assaulting paramedics. According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Israeli forces stormed their medical point in the al-Far’a refugee camp on Wednesday, detained team members and cut off communication with them.
“Even the best-equipped hospital would struggle to cope with the catastrophe unfolding now in Jenin basically, and I think the situation just urgently calls for international support,” Dr. Ahmad Qaaqour, former ICU chief at the Ibn Sana Hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin, said on Wednesday. “And the medical community needs advanced equipment, additional trained personnel and psychological support for the medical staff, patients and even the families there.”
The Desperate Call For Accountability From The International Community
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The health care workers’ testimonies are consistent with separate reports by the multiple United Nations agencies, human rights groups and media about the abuse and torture Palestinians face in Israeli prisons. In fact, HRW found back in 1994 that Israel failed to provide proper accountability for the decades of torture and abuse of Palestinian captives.
“It’s not new,” Haj Hassan said. “It’s just occurring at a much more severe both rate of detention and scale of detention.”
Israeli prison officers faced more than 1,800 abuse complaints between 2019 and 2022, according to a November report by the Israeli Knesset’s Research and Information Center. Of those, zero resulted in a criminal conviction.
“The torture of Palestinian health care workers is a window into the much larger issue of the Israeli government’s treatment of detainees generally,” HRW’s Jarrah said. “Governments should publicly call on the Israeli authorities to release unlawfully detained health care workers and end the cruel mistreatment and nightmarish conditions for all detained Palestinians.”
According to Common Article 3 to the four Geneva Conventions, “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities … shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.” The article also says that torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” are always prohibited.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention bans individual forcible transfers within an occupied territory, as well as deportations of civilians from the occupied territory to the occupier’s territory. Violating these articles with criminal intent could chalk Israel’s arbitrary detention and abuse as war crimes, with the help of unconditional military aid from the United States.
“Israel could not get away with bombing hospitals if the United States did not allow it to continue to do that,” Dr. Tammy Abughnaim told HuffPost last week. “Israel could not get away with detaining health care workers if the United States did not provide political cover for that as well.”