Since October 2023, Israeli occupation forces have detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza, transported them to detention facilities in "Israel", and subjected them to torture and mistreatment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) revealed in a new report.

The detention of these workers, amid ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, has further exacerbated the already dire state of the territory’s healthcare system, HRW said.

Former detainees, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics, have reported severe mistreatment while in Israeli custody. Their accounts include experiences of humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care. Additionally, they described instances of torture, including rape and sexual abuse, as well as inadequate conditions for the general detainee population.

“The Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinian healthcare workers has continued in the shadows and needs to immediately stop,” said Balkees Jarrah, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

“The torture and other ill-treatment of doctors, nurses, and paramedics should be thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, including by the International Criminal Court (ICC),” he added.

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From March to June 2024, Human Rights Watch interviewed eight Palestinian healthcare workers who were taken by the Israeli military from Gaza between November and December 2023. These workers were detained without charge for periods ranging from seven days to five months. Six of them were detained while at work, following Israeli sieges of hospitals or during evacuations that they assured were coordinated with the Israeli military.

Osama Tashtash, 28, a doctor at the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia who was arrested in early December at his home nearby told HRW, "We were forced to strip in the street and remain in our boxers, one by one; for an hour and a half, we were on our knees.” 

None of the detainees were informed of the reasons for their detention or charged with any offense. Human Rights Watch also interviewed seven witnesses who observed Israeli soldiers detaining healthcare workers while they were performing their duties.

Human Rights Watch sent preliminary findings to the Israeli military and Israeli Prison Services on August 13 but has not received a response.

The accounts from all the interviewed healthcare workers regarding mistreatment in Israeli custody were consistent. After being detained in Gaza, they were transferred to detention facilities in "Israel", including the Sde Teiman concentration camp in the Naqab desert, Ashkelon prison, the Anatot military base near al-Quds, and the Ofer detention facility in the occupied West Bank. They reported being stripped, beaten, blindfolded, and handcuffed for extended periods and faced pressure to confess to being Hamas fighters, accompanied by threats of indefinite detention, rape, and violence against their families in Gaza.

Eyad Abed, 50, a surgeon at the Indonesian Hospital who was detained during a coordinated evacuation of the hospital in November, said, "Every minute we were beaten. I mean all over the body, on sensitive areas between the legs, the chest, the back. We were kicked all over the body and the face. They used the front of their boots which had a metal tip, then their weapons. They had lighters: one soldier tried to burn me but burned the person next to me. I told them I’m a doctor, but they didn’t care."

Human Rights Watch stated that the extended arbitrary detention and abuse of healthcare workers have worsened the health crisis in Gaza. Since October, more than 92,000 individuals in Gaza have been injured, and functional hospitals now have fewer than 1,500 inpatient beds. Despite this, Israeli authorities have permitted only 35 percent of nearly 14,000 medical evacuation requests to be fulfilled, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report from August 5.
 
Furthermore, the healthcare workers' testimonies align with independent reports from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Israeli news media, and various human rights organizations. These reports document numerous cases of incommunicado detention, beatings, sexual violence, forced confessions, electrocution, and other forms of torture and abuse suffered by Palestinians in Israeli detention.

A detained paramedic, who was moved to the al-Naqab prison after 20 days at Sde Teiman, recounted that a man visibly "bleeding from his bottom" was brought in and placed next to him. The man informed the paramedic that before his detention, “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle]. No one else knew, but he told me as a paramedic. He was terrified.” In addition, a doctor said while he was detained in a military base, a detainee, “in his late 30s, crying hard … told me he was sexually assaulted during the strip search.”
 
Human Rights Watch has found that for decades, Israeli authorities have not provided credible accountability for the torture and other abuses inflicted on Palestinian detainees. Official Israeli statistics reveal that from 2019 to 2022, 1,830 abuse complaints were filed against Israeli Prison Services officers, yet none led to criminal convictions. Additionally, since the war on Gaza began, Israeli authorities have denied independent humanitarian agencies access to Palestinian detainees. 

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