Hundreds of highly-skilled doctors and other medical personnel snatched from hospitals across Gaza by the Israeli military. Taken hostage without explanation. Secreted to prisons in Israel, held without charges, then subjected to months of barbaric torture—constant humiliations, regular beatings, attacks by dogs, baton rape, genital mutilation, electrocution, starvation, denial of medical care and legal rights. Their jailers brutally try to make it impossible for them to ever practice medicine again.
This is what’s recently been revealed by two new, in-depth investigations. One by the Guardian newspaper and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), who interviewed eight of Gaza’s most senior doctors, all who’d been imprisoned and tortured.1 And a report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel titled “Unlawfully Detained, Tortured, and Starved: The Plight of Gaza’s Medical Workers in Israeli Custody.”
While the fascist Trump goes on and on about the mistreatment of Israeli hostages, held by Hamas since the reactionary attack on October 7, 2023, he is of course silent about Israel's detention, abuse, and torture of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian prisoners, over years and decades. Because to this fascist regime, and to the American empire, the Palestinian people count for nothing!
To be clear, torture under any circumstances by any party is wrong, a crime against humanity. And Hamas, a reactionary Islamic fundamentalist organization, abducting civilians to be held as collateral should be condemned. But the outright, open abduction and torture of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel in Gaza is a genocidal act which has been largely ignored, covered up, or excused.2
According to the World Health Organization, nearly 300 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers from Gaza were detained by Israel.3 And at least 1,000 have been killed since October 2023 in Israel’s vicious onslaught against Gaza. Two senior doctors have died in Israeli detention.
These reports are focused on the treatment of doctors and healthcare workers, and they document in great detail Israel’s systematic, deliberate violence and Nazi-like depravity. They expose Israel's utter immorality and trampling on international law, including protections for medical personnel.
To be clear, this sadistic mistreatment is not limited to medical personnel, but illustrates how Israel treats all its Palestinian prisoners.
A freed Palestinian prisoner shows wounds on his hands after being released, February 27, 2025. Photo: AP
To take one current example, many of the Palestinian prisoners recently released as part of Israel’s ceasefire deal with Hamas “showed clear signs of torture, starvation and severe medical neglect.” As one put it, “The period of captivity was not just being held captive. It was torture, torture beyond description.4
This terror must not be ignored or covered up.5
Here are devastating excerpts from some of the doctors’ testimonies.
Shortly after release from Israeli prison in July, 2024, Dr Issam Abu Ajwa, describes how he was tortured.
Dr Issam Abu Ajwa of al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza. He was in the middle of performing a surgery when Israel soldiers burst into the operating room.
“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre. One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”
He was dragged out, handcuffed, blindfolded, stripped, and driven to a detention center in Israel where he was handcuffed for 24 hours a day.
“There were no rules… They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside.”
“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing.” They even broke his teeth. “They have no humanity.”
“One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I was a senior consultant surgeon they should work hard to make sure that I lost [the use of my hands] and became unable to perform surgery…. They said they wanted to make sure I could never return to work.”
He has been released, fixed his teeth and returned to work. “As for the interrogator who was determined to make me lose sensation in my hands, I say: ‘no matter what you do … I am a doctor, and I will practice my profession. I will always continue, until my last breath, to be in the operating theatre.”6
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. He was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint in November 2023 after being ordered to evacuate his hospital.
“When I told them my name, they pointed their weapons at me and their laser [sights] at my head and chest and I was immediately detained … as if they were waiting for me, as if they had seized a big prize.”
“They stripped me naked, put a blindfold over my eyes and handcuffed my feet. The beatings started from this first moment…. They beat me with rifle butts and chairs. After that, they poured sand over my head and shoved dirt into my mouth.” In prison he was also attacked by dogs.
“There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there.”
“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened.”7
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian associate professor of surgery, who volunteered as a doctor in Gaza. He says the torture and humiliation of senior medical staff in Israel’s prisons is “beyond devastating.”
“These are some of the most revered, most respected and senior members of their communities,” he says. “It is nothing short of a deliberate attempt to subjugate and violate the whole of Gazan society.” 8
Dr. Khaled Alser, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. He was abducted from Gaza and held in Israel for seven months.
“Anyone inside Sde Teiman [the prison where he was being held], at least once faced beating by batons, by fists, kicking, or even get bitten by the dogs.”
“They entered every one week or twice weekly.... They ordered all the prisoners on their tummy. And after that, they choose randomly anyone inside the prison to beat him with a baton or to spray him with pepper spray. And sometimes — I heard a lot of testimony from prisoners inside the prison.”
“They came to me seeking a medical advice, because they have been sexually assaulted by the soldiers using batons and sometimes using the electrical guns in their sensitive areas. And sometimes they spray their faces and their private parts by pepper spray. All of this happened to me.”9
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. This renowned Gaza pediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital was not able to speak to the Guardian or Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. He was abducted by Israel last December and remains imprisoned. A video was recently broadcast on Israeli TV, showing him hobbled and in shackles, between two prison guards. His family denounced the broadcast: “We… reject any media outlet publishing the video without addressing the psychological terrorism involved and exposing the manipulation of his statements. The sight of our father shackled and unable to move should prompt immediate and continuous action to ensure his immediate release.”10
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Naji Abbas, the Prisoners and Detainees Department director for Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, said:
"...we started to understood that the doctors were arrested mainly for collecting information. When you hear a doctor saying that he was forced to draw a map of the hospital, when he was asked about his colleagues... you can understand that there’s a pattern of questioning looking, fishing — fishing for information. And they weren’t accused or charged with anything. All of the doctors, more than 100 medical staff who’s still, 'til now, in detention, have the same story... They weren't charged or accused as individuals with any offense. But all the interrogation were collecting information about their workplace, about their colleagues, about the health system in Gaza. And beside the doctors who were arrested inside the hospitals, we met doctors who were arrested through checkpoints of Israel’s army inside Gaza when they were trying to move with their families. So, if a soldier heard that he’s a doctor, he was arrested. So you can understand that they were targeted directly because of their profession."
Medics inspect ruins of Al Najjar hospital destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, January 19, 2025 Photo: AP
All these arrests, and the torture of doctors and the medical personnel has had "a catastrophic impact on civilians." It denied the sick and the wounded any chance adequate medical care, according to the UN Human Rights Office report. This—along with the bombing of hospitals, and cutting of all medical supplies into Gaza—has led to "the almost total collapse of Gaza's healthcare system."11
This has contributed to the death of at least 48,000 Palestinians (and perhaps double that) due to Israel’s military onslaught since October 2023.
The targeting and torture of medical workers, especially experienced doctors, and the collection of information about Gaza’s medical system are parts of Israel’s systemic campaign to destroy that medical system... and the basic ability for the Palestinian people to survive in Gaza.
All this underscores the truth and urgency of “A Timely Provocation from Bob Avakian,” the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism:
The following is a companion to my statement that: After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.
Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!
This is the terrible but unavoidable conclusion that has to be drawn from the whole history of Israel, in its murderous oppression of the Palestinian people, and the current genocidal actions of Israel, along with the statements of high officials of the Israeli government, as well as backers of Israel, in attempting to justify all this.
It also has to be said that none of this could have happened without the full, unwavering support of U.S. imperialism for Israel’s continuing crimes against humanity and war crimes: its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, its apartheid rule over them for generations, and now the heightened genocidal slaughter in Gaza and the mounting violence of illegitimate settlers, backed by the Israeli army, against Palestinian people in the West Bank.
This puts a special responsibility on the people in this country to stand up and demand that the U.S./Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People STOP!
