Gaza hospital chief recounts torture and isolation in Israeli detention

Middle East Eye

10-03-2025

Testimony from the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza paints a brutal picture of Israeli detention, including accounts of torture, starvation and the poor conditions prisoners are forced to endure.
Speaking to Arab48, the lawyer of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya said that he was prevented from meeting anyone, including his lawyer, from the day he was detained on 27 December until 10 February.
In late December last year, the hospital was stormed by Israeli troops following nearly three months of a suffocating blockade and constant air strikes on its departments and the area surrounding them.
All medical staff, patients, and their relatives were taken out of the hospital at gunpoint, forced to strip down to their underwear and transferred to an unknown location.
The Palestinian health ministry said dozens of doctors were taken to detention centres for interrogation, including Abu Safiya.
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Lawyer Ghaid Qassem was able to visit the doctor in the notorious Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank, where he has been detained for over 70 days after spending nearly two weeks at the Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev desert.
Isolation and torture
Qassem's visit on 6 March was only the second lawyer visit granted to Abu Safiya since his incarceration and came after several pleas by lawyers.
"Until February 10, 2025, Abu Safiya was denied the right to meet with any lawyer, with Israeli authorities explicitly refusing to allow anyone to visit him, preventing him from documenting the violations that took place," she said.
'The longest period of interrogation that Abu Safiya endured was 13 consecutive days, with each session lasting between eight to 10 hours'
- Ghaid Qassem, lawyer to Dr Hussam Abu Safiya
According to Qassem, the paediatric doctor was arrested and imprisoned for refusing to obey expulsion orders by the Israeli army "because his conscience and professionalism required him to remain in the hospital, especially with the presence of dozens of patients and wounded children."
His lawyer detailed that he was isolated for 14 days in Sde Teiman and an additional 25 days in Ofer. He was later transferred to Section 24 in Ofer, where detainees from Gaza remain separated from other prisoners.
"The longest period of interrogation that Abu Safiya endured was 13 consecutive days, with each session lasting between eight to 10 hours. Throughout this entire time, he was subjected to relentless and brutal abuse, torture, and assault," Qassem said.
She added that the detainees are "almost completely isolated inside the prison", without any knowledge or information about the outside world, unless they are allowed a visit.
Qassem said that intelligence services psychologically torment prisoners with news of their loved ones' deaths, regardless if it is true or not.
"The situation of all Palestinians inside Israeli prisons is catastrophic and deplorable, but specifically, the situation of Gaza prisoners is exceptional and more difficult because they have no previous experience with imprisonment," she said.
Slaughterhouse prisons
Abu Safiya's lawyer describes the abuse and torture present in Israeli detention centres as "unprecedented".
"If we talk about the Sde Timan prison, it is a slaughterhouse in every sense of the word," she said.
"We are talking about prisoners who have been shackled for 10 months, prisoners whose limbs have been amputated without treatment, elderly prisoners who are shackled and blindfolded, prisoners who have lost 70-90 kilograms of their weight
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"Addionally, there's the issue of the bitter cold, as the prisoners are held in open cages, meaning that they are exposed to wind and rainwater, and they are forced to sit on the ground at all times and are forbidden from talking to each other and from praying and reading the Quran."
In late February, Israeli media aired footage of Abu Safiya, visibly exhausted and shackled by both hands and feet, being escorted by Israeli forces.
Qassem said the doctor was surprised that he was being filmed and was not informed prior to the broadcast.
Regarding Abu Safiya's legal situation, the lawyer said the Israeli authorities attempted to reframe Abu Safiya's case as a regular security case in order to file an indictment.
"After a series of interrogations and severe torture to force him to sign anything they could use as evidence for the indictment, they were unable to find any grounds against him after more than 45 days," she said.
"They then returned his case to its original designation (illegal fighter), and the file of an illegal fighter carries no rights, whether in terms of representation or an indictment. Each time, the decision to extend his detention is renewed.'"
However, Qassem says that she left Abu Safiya in high spirits, ending the meeting with the following message: ''A human being is history, and their history is defined by a position that is taken and studied."
'Prisoners are in danger, save them'
Abu Safiya's experience of torture is one of many inside Israeli prisons.
In early April last year, a doctor at an Israeli field hospital where Palestinians detained from Gaza are held described harrowing details of conditions, including limb amputation due to handcuff injuries and prisoners forced to defecate in nappies.
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The unnamed doctor working at the Sde Teiman facility, between Gaza and Bersheeba in the Negev desert, wrote about the experiences in a letter to Israel's defence minister, health minister and the legal adviser to the government. The letter was reported by Haaretz.
"This makes all of us - the medical teams and you, those in charge of us in the health and defence ministries - complicit in the violation of Israeli law, and perhaps worse for me as a doctor, in the violation of my basic commitment to patients, wherever they are, as I swore when I graduated 20 years ago," he wrote.
The last groups of freed Palestinian detainees showed signs of distress, abuse, starvation and medical negligence in Israeli-run prisons and detention centres.
A number of them have only received medical attention after their release.
In one clip, a former detainee in a bus entering the Gaza Strip warned about the condition of those remaining in prison, shouting: "Prisoners [inside Israeli jails] are in danger. Save them."
Rampant torture has been recorded in civilian and military detention facilities across Israel in recent months, resulting in the deaths of more than 60 Palestinians since 7 October 2023, among them at least 39 from Gaza.