Hundreds of Gaza medics 'unlawfully detained, tortured, and starved'

Israeli human rights organisation says 250 healthcare professionals have been detained since beginning of war in Gaza

A Palestinian baby receives treatment in an incubator at the Patient Friends Hospital in Gaza city. AP

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Hundreds of Palestinian medical workers from Gaza have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Israel, according to a new report by a leading Israeli human rights organisation.

More than 250 healthcare professionals have been detained since October 2023, when the Gaza War began, said Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI). The organisation said detainees had experienced “systematic abuses, including enforced disappearance, extreme physical violence, medical neglect and interrogations without legal representation,” as well as starvation.

The report adds to a growing list of accusations by leading human rights organisations, UN agencies and NGOs that Israel is violating international humanitarian law and not respecting human rights, as well as making Palestinian health care specifically a target. Gaza’s medics have been operating in critical conditions throughout the conflict, during which hospitals have been bombed, medics killed and equipment blocked from entering the strip.

Israel did not publicly comment on the latest report.

Damage to a room following Israeli bombardment at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on December 17, 2023. AFP

The report says that more than 180 medics remain in detention, with arrests primarily taking place “in hospitals and medical facilities, where healthcare personnel were forcibly removed, stripped, humiliated and subjected to brutal treatment”. The report adds that: "Israeli authorities have yet to present credible evidence linking these individuals to security threats.”

Israel and Hamas agreed to a hostage-ceasefire deal in January, under which dozens of hostages have been swapped for Palestinian prisoners and detainees, although the agreement is entering a particularly fragile stage with a number of Israeli government ministers calling for a resumption in fighting. The pause in hostilities has allowed for better access to medical equipment, along with other humanitarian supplies, but experts say health care in the strip is still greatly hampered.

PHRI collected 24 testimonies from detained medics, including Dr Khalid Al Sir, a surgeon from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of the strip’s largest facilities, who said Israeli forces stripped him and his colleagues before their detention.

“They tied our hands with plastic zip ties for five days, interrogating us inside abandoned homes, torturing and beating my colleagues," he recounted. Another surgeon, Dr MT, said military dogs were set on detainees while troops laughed. “They made us bark like dogs,” he said.

Reconstruction equipment bound for Gaza near the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. EPA

The report added that most of the detainees have not been charged or had evidence levelled against them, with many told vaguely that they would be held “until the end of the war”. PHRI said the abuses are “systematic violations of international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly protects medical personnel during wartime”.

The report follows the damning assessments of two UN special rapporteurs in January, who said Israel was conducting a “blatant assault on the right to health in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory [which is] plumbing new depths of impunity”.

“The heroic actions of Palestinian medical colleagues in Gaza, teach us what it means to have taken the medical oath. They are also a clear signal of a depraved humanity that has allowed a genocide to continue for well over a year,” said Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, and Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva dismissed the statement in January as “far removed from the truth”. It added that it “completely ignores critical facts and the broader context of Hamas’s exploitation of civilian infrastructure for military purposes”.