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Palestinian doctors working in Gaza have accused Israeli forces of using electric shocks, turning medics into human shields and repeatedly torturing them after being arrested without charge.
Dr Khaled Al-Serr, a surgeon at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, said the Israeli military raided the facility where he worked on two different occasions, arresting dozens of medical workers as they treated injured Palestinians.
He alleged that when he was detained in March last year, he was stripped naked alongside four others and forced to act as a human shield before being taken to Sde Teiman military detention centre in southern Israel.
There, he said he was coerced into making confessions while handcuffed for three months even while asleep, beaten so badly his ribs broke, and interrogated about the hospital.
His account comes as the United Nations said on Monday that Israel killed 15 more medical and emergency workers as they attempted to rescue the injured from the southern city of Rafah.
More than 250 Palestinian medics – including doctors, nurses and paramedics – are believed to have been held in Israel since war in Gaza erupted in October 2023, according to human rights’ group Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), who claim 180 are still behind bars “without due process or clarity”.
In October, an UN independent commission concluded that Israel has perpetrated “a concerted policy” to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, with “relentless and deliberate attacks” on medical personnel and facilities amounting to war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination.
The Israeli military has repeatedly denied accusations of abusing and targeting medics and accused Hamas militants of using hospitals in Gaza as bases despite providing scant evidence of such a serious charge.
But Palestinian healthcare workers described violent raids and bombings of hospitals, mass arrests and disappearances of personnel, torture and deaths in detention.
Details of the alleged abuse come as The Independent released its own investigation, revealing evidence of abuse, torture, and deaths of Palestinian detainees, including some of Gaza’s most renowned medics, in Israel’s jails.
Recalling his alleged treatment one night, Dr Al-Serr told The Independent: “I was tied everywhere, from my ankles to my wrists. I wasn’t able to move, I was not able to breathe properly.
“There were soldiers sitting over me, putting their shoes over me. One kept kicking me and punching with the back of his gun or his foot… Every two minutes, I either get beaten by a fist or a kick butt in the back of their guns. I describe it as the way to hell.”
He said injured inmates would come to him for help – including four men who told him they had been raped by Israeli prison guards with sharp objects, causing rectal bleeding.
One man, 24 years old, was so disturbed by the torture – he told Dr Al-Serr it included rape and being told Israel had bombed his family in Gaza because he would not confess – that he had a breakdown and would uncontrollably defecate and urinate on himself when the guards arrived. It got so bad that Dr Al-Serr insisted the guards give him a nappy to wear.
Dr Iyas al-Bursh, a GP who worked at Al Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, said he was also arrested while working last March. He described spending four months in Sde Teiman and then seven in Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank.
“It was a harsh and difficult life and experience interspersed with torment and torture in all forms, whether it was physical torture from beating, punching, and electric shocks to psychological torture and medical neglect,” he said, adding that he lost multiple family members in Israel’s bombings.
“We were denied our human rights and were prevented from communicating with our families or any legal authority.”
The Israeli military has investigated at least one instance of guards in Sde Teiman allegedly torturing an inmate – in an indictment seen by The Independent, five guards are accused of aggravated assault, including “stabbing” an inmate with a sharp object, which resulted in an internal rectal tear.
They however said this was an “exceptional” incident and denied ill treamtent of medics.
“Regarding the detention of medical staff – some suspects were detained during operations in medical facilities, which have been used by Hamas and other terrorist organisations for military purposes,” the military said in a statement to the Independent.
“Among the detainees were also medical staff or individuals who impersonated such staff, who were found to be involved in terrorist activities, and some were even revealed to be members of the military wing of Hamas while simultaneously working at the medical institution. The IDF operates in accordance with international law, and does not detain medical workers due to their work as such.”
Speaking to The Independent, Yasmine al-Bursh, wife of Dr Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned Palestinian surgeon, described how she pieced together what happened to him after he died in Ofer prison last April, four months after being detained.
She said former cellmates described how he had lost nearly half his body weight and had been subjected to extreme violence and torture.
Dr Guy Shalev, an Israeli doctor and PHRI’s director, said Palestinian medics were being targeted by Israel, despite their unique protection under conventions and international law, at a time when the destruction of healthcare system infrastructure is causing even more impact.
“We know that when the only paediatric orthopaedist in the near region of Gaza is being held in an Israeli incarceration facility, that person is not there doing the important work,” he said.
“If you attack a healthcare system, you don’t only attack the few hundred people that you attack, or the few hundred people that you detain. You damage an entire population.”
He warned that the violation of international conventions and the protection of healthcare in Gaza, is something “we as humanity are going to pay for in future conflicts”.
“These violations are so out in the open, so clear, and we see no accountability; there is no effective international pressure on Israel to abide by these conventions – that it basically means that these conventions have no meaning or are not applicable in practice.
“This is very worrying in terms of what the future of care – the idea, the ability to care for another person – looks like.”
Israel launched a devastating invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas militants’ bloody attacks on southern Israel on 7 October, during which they killed over 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.
More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment, according to Palestinian health officials—among them are more than 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals, according to the United Nations.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, warned in January that the UN had documented at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities in Gaza, adding that the “protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
At the moment, only 15 of the 24 hospitals are functioning – with so many medics behind bars that several departments are not functioning.
