Medical workers in Israel have told the BBC that Palestinian detainees from Gaza are routinely kept shackled to hospital beds, blindfolded, sometimes naked, and forced to wear nappies – a practice one medic said amounted to “torture”.
A whistle-blower detailed how procedures in one military hospital were “routinely” carried out without painkillers, causing “an unacceptable amount of pain” to detainees.
Another whistle-blower said painkillers were used “selectively” and “in a very limited way” during an invasive medical procedure on a Gazan detainee in a public hospital.
He also said critically ill patients being held in makeshift military facilities were being denied proper treatment because of a reluctance by public hospitals to transfer and treat them.
One detainee, taken from Gaza for questioning by the Israeli army and later released, told the BBC his leg had to be amputated because he was denied treatment for an infected wound.
A senior doctor working inside the military hospital at the centre of the allegations denied that any amputations were the direct result of conditions there, but described the shackles and other restraints used by guards as “dehumanisation”.
The Israeli army said detainees at the facility were treated “appropriately and carefully”.
The two whistle-blowers the BBC spoke to were both in positions to assess the medical treatment of detainees. Both asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue among their colleagues.
Their accounts are supported by a report, published in February by Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, which said that Israel’s civilian and military prisons had become “an apparatus of retribution and revenge” and that detainees’ human rights were being violated – in particular their right to health.
Yoni also said that the Sde Teiman field hospital was not equipped to treat severely injured patients, but that some of those held there in the early months of the war had fresh gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen.
He said at least one critically ill man was kept there because of a reluctance by public hospitals to accept his transfer for treatment, adding that doctors at the base were “frustrated” by the situation.
Sufian Abu Salah, a 43-year-old taxi driver from Khan Youis, was one of dozens of men detained during raids by Israel’s army and taken to a military base for questioning.
He said soldiers carried out severe beatings during the journey and also on arrival at the base, where he was denied treatment for a minor wound on his foot, which then became infected.
“My leg got infected and turned blue, and as soft as a sponge,” he told the BBC.
After a week, he said, the guards took him to hospital, beating him on his injured leg on the way. Two operations to clean his wound did not work, he told the BBC.
“Afterwards, they took me to a public hospital, where the doctor gave me two options: my leg or my life.”
He chose his life. After they amputated his leg, he was sent back to the military base, and later released back to Gaza.
“This period was mental and physical torture,” he said. “I can’t describe it. I was detained with two legs and now I have only one. Every now and then, I cry.”
The IDF did not respond to the specific allegations about Sufian’s treatment, but said the claims of violence towards him during his arrest or detention “were unknown and will be examined”.
In the days after the 7 October attack, Israel’s Health Ministry issued a directive that all Gazan detainees should be treated in military or prison hospitals, with the Sde Teiman field hospital created specifically to fill this role.
The decision won the backing of many in Israel’s medical establishment, with Yossi Walfisch, praising it as the solution to “an ethical dilemma”, which would remove responsibility for treating “Hamas terrorists” from the public health system.
Others have called for the closure of Sde Teiman, describing the situation there as “an unprecedented low point for the medical profession, and medical ethics.”
“My fear is that what we’re doing in Sde Teiman won’t allow a return to the way it was before,” one doctor told the BBC. “Because things that looked unreasonable to us before, will look reasonable when this crisis is over.”
Yoel Donchin, the anaesthesiologist, said medical staff at the field hospital sometimes gathered together to cry over the situation there.
“The moment our hospital closes,” he said, “we’ll celebrate.”
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