Leading Gaza surgeon tortured to death in Israeli detention

Nearly 500 healthcare workers have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza since 7 October

Palestinian orthopedic surgeon Adnan al-Bursh, who served as the head of orthopedic surgery at Al-Shifa Hospital, was killed in an Israeli detention center after being imprisoned for more than four months.

According to a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Bursh, 50, was tortured to death on 19 April in Ofer Prison, an Israeli-run incarceration facility in the occupied West Bank. The group characterized his murder as a “deliberate assassination.”

His body has not been released by Israeli authorities, according to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee.

Another detainee, Ismail Abdul Bari Khader, 33, also died in custody, the joint statement from the Palestinian organizations says. Khader’sis body was released on 2 May along with 64 other prisoners.

“The two victims died of torture and crimes committed against Gazan detainees,” the statement stresses.

Bursh was arrested last December along with 10 other medical workers during the Israeli military ground assault of the Jabalya refugee camp as he was treating patients at Al-Awada Hospital in northern Gaza.

After patients, health workers, and hundreds of forcibly displaced Palestinians were violently evicted from Al-Shifa by the invading troops, he moved to the Indonesian Hospital, where he was injured in an attack. He later relocated to Al-Awada Hospital before his capture.

Gaza health authorities said in a statement that Bursh’s murder has raised the number of healthcare workers killed by Israel in Gaza to 496. It added that 1,500 others had been wounded while 309 had been arrested since 7 October.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said on Friday that she was “extremely alarmed” at the death of the prominent doctor.

“I urge the diplomatic community to intervene with concrete measures to protect Palestinians. No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation today,” she said via social media.

Last month, the Commission for Prisoners’ and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society revealed that the number of Palestinian prisoners being held across Israeli prisons surpassed 9,500.

The prisoners include 80 women and over 200 children held in Israel’s Megiddo, Ofer, and Damon prisons. However, these numbers do not include the thousands detained or subjected to forced disappearance by Israeli forces in Gaza.

According to the joint statement, more than 3,660 Palestinians are being held without charge, including 22 women and 40 children.

An Israeli doctor who worked at an Israeli detention center in Gaza recently warned authorities in Tel Aviv about the inhumane conditions Palestinian prisoners face, revealing that the detainees are regularly blindfolded, fed through straws, forced to defecate in diapers, and are shackled by all four limbs 24 hours a day, resulting in severe injuries that often require amputation.

Released Palestinian prisoners have also given accounts of sexual abuse and extreme torture by their Israeli jailers.