On December 27, 2024, Israeli forces stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza and they took their director, the doctor Hussam Abu Morningalong with members of the medical staff and patients. The 52-year-old pediatrician was expected to have been released this week as part of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas, but Israel he refuses. He has just extended his detention for another six months, without any formal charge. At first, the Israeli Army denied having detained the prestigious doctor and his team. Then, in a statement in January, he said he was involved in “terrorist activities” and was part of Hamaswithout providing any evidence.
In prison he is being subjected to mistreatment. “There is concern about his health: he has problems heart and one sarna worrying on the skin, and for a long time they have kept it in a dark isolation cell and without medical treatment,” he explains to this newspaper Carlos de las Herasresponsible for the Middle East at Amnesty International Spain.
Hussam Abu Morning / .
During his captivity, Abu Safiya has become a symbol of Israeli punishment of the Gazan healthcare system, which human rights organizations consider to have a genocidal intent. In addition to destroying the bulk of the Strip’s hospitals, the Israel Defense Forces have detained dozens of doctors and nurses without formally charging them with any crime.
In November 2023 (after the Hamas attacks of October 7 in which 1,139 people were killed) the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu hardened the “illegitimate combatants law”which empowers the Army to detain anyone it suspects of participating in hostilities against Israel. They can renew detention indefinitely without having to present evidence to justify the accusations. Abu Safiya is being held under that law, but he is not the only one.
Signs of torture
This week, Israel released a total of 1,968 Palestinians detained in their prisons and internment camps, in exchange for the last 20 Israeli hostages alive who had been in the hands of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The vast majority of the freed Palestinians were civilians arrested under the “enemy combatants law” en masse and without charge in Gaza during these two years of war, including women and children.
They have suffered all kinds of calamities. First, during their arrest: they were stripped naked, paraded through the streets of the enclave, put in trucks and made to disappear, without access to lawyers, without charge and without communication with their families. Thats mass arrests They were used, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights organizations, to later be used in exchanges with Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Palestinian women and men detained in Israeli soccer stadium / Yosee Gamzoo Letova
Israel then took them to detention campswhere they were kept blindfolded and handcuffed almost all the time, forced into tense positions for hours, says Amnesty International. Some had to have limbs amputated due to gangrene caused by the chains, according to a CNN investigation based on testimonies from repentant Israeli jailers at the camp. Sdeeman. In that detention center they kept a group of detainees completely immobilized in beds, blindfolded, fed by tube and with diapers to collect their excrement, a form of torture by sensory deprivation.
The Israel Defense Forces have denied the allegations of these journalistic investigations and, more generally, systematic abuse and torture in their prisons.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have kept dozens of Israeli hostages, military and civiliansin tunnels and homes in the Strip during these two years of war. After their release, some have reported mistreatment, humiliation and sexual abuse.
The version of the Palestinian prisoners’ organizations
Of those 1,968 prisoners released on October 13, 250 were sentenced to life imprisonment. The vast majority, 1,718, “were kidnapped from Gaza after the beginning of the genocide and detained without trial or charge,” the newspaper reports to this newspaper. Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) and the Prisoner Affairs Commissiontwo organizations based in Ramallah, capital of the West Bank. In total, Israel has freed 3,985 people in three consecutive prisoner-for-hostage exchange agreements in these two years of war.
“The images of the released prisoners once again show brutality and criminal practices against thousands of Palestinians and Arab detainees in Israeli prisons and military detention camps,” these organizations say. “Many, especially Gazans, show clear signs of physical and psychological torture. They have been subjected to deliberate starvation, denial of medical treatment, intentional conditions for the spread of epidemic diseases, isolation… In prisons there have been sessions of repression organized by special units such as those called Keter, Metzada and Nashon: beatings, use of gas and stun grenades, electric shocks, humiliation, sexual assaults including rape and the use of the disease as a form of torture, as seen in the spread of scabies among prisoners. This is in addition to psychological terror, solitary confinement, threats of murder and execution.”
At least 78 Palestinian prisoners have died in prison, according to these two organizations.
Israeli prisons
In its report ‘Welcome to hell’, the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem last year collected testimonies from 55 Palestinian civilians detained after October 7 and later released without charge. “Israel has a network of civil and military prisons and camps dedicated to the systematic abuse of detainees and which are de facto torture camps: prisoners are subjected to intense and continuous suffering.”
Beatings and sleep deprivation are common. In a security camera video leaked to Israeli media, a group of soldiers are seen gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner.
Save The Children maintains that there are systematic abuse, including sexual abuse, of detained children. The best-known case is that of Ahmad Manasra, arrested at the age of 13 and interrogated for alleged terrorism in isolation without the presence of lawyers or his parents. He spent almost a decade in prison, and after his release it was found that he had completely lost contact with reality and his mental health.
In a report last year, Amnesty International documented the cases of 27 Palestinians (one child, five women and 21 men) who were detained under the illegal combatants law for periods of detention. up to four and a half months without access to legal assistance nor any contact with their families. All people interviewed said they had been subjected to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment.
Administrative detention system
“The situation in Israeli prisons is very complicated for detainees: mistreatment, torture, solitary confinement, solitary confinement without visits from lawyers and family members. There are 3,000 Palestinian prisoners under administrative detention for decades,” concludes de las Heras.
After this round of liberations thanks to the ceasefire engineered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, there are now around 9,100 Palestinian prisoners, in prisons or military camps. Of them, 52 are women and about 400 are children, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ commission.
Israel is holding at least 730 Palestinian bodies, some for decades, to use as bargaining chips in negotiations, according to the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC). He demands that the Palestinian militias, for their part, hand over twenty lifeless bodies of Israeli hostages.
