THE director of Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, who had been detained by Israeli forces for more than seven months, says he was put through ‘severe torture’ during his detention in Israeli prisons.
Mohammed Abu Salmiya was among more than 50 Palestinians released and returned to Gaza.
Salmiya told a press conference on Monday that detainees ‘are subjected to all kinds of torture,’ in Israel’s prisons and detention centres.
‘There was almost daily torture. Cells are broken into and prisoners are beaten.
‘Several inmates died in interrogation centres and were deprived of food and medicine,’ the hospital chief said.
Salmiya said the regime’s prison guards ‘broke his finger and caused his head to bleed during beatings, in which they used batons and dogs.’
According to him, the Israeli regime’s medical staff at different detention facilities had also taken part ‘in violation of all laws’.
Some Palestinian detainees, he said, had limbs amputated because of poor medical care.
And there are still thousands of detainees being held by the regime’s forces.
According to the Gaza media office, the regime forces have kidnapped at least 5,000 Palestinians since October 2023, when the military launched its bloodiest-ever war in the besieged territory.
The fate of many of them or the conditions of their detention are still unknown, said the media office.
The Israeli regime released the al-Shifa Hospital director after nearly eight months because its prisons are now so severely overcrowded.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, said previously that they had received reports that Palestinians were being beaten, kept in cells blindfolded and handcuffed for excessive periods, deprived of sleep, and threatened with physical and sexual violence.
Other reports suggest detainees have been insulted and exposed to acts of humiliation, such as being photographed and filmed in degrading poses.
The UN expert urged the regime to allow immediate access to international human rights and humanitarian observers to all the places in which Palestinians have been detained since last October.
Human rights groups have repeatedly raised the alarm about ‘unprecedented difficult conditions’ in which all Palestinian detainees, including women, are being held. Around 80 female detainees are currently being held in the regime’s prisons.
A rights group has also documented a new Israeli war crime in the Gaza Strip where an occupation tank deliberately ran over a Palestinian mother in front of her son.
- The government media office in the Gaza Strip says another Palestinian journalist has been killed in the besieged coastal sliver, pushing the journalists’ death toll to 153 since the Tel Aviv regime unleashed its military raids, bombardments and missile attacks last October.
Muhammad Abu Sharia, head of the editorial department at Shams News Agency, succumbed to his wounds on Monday morning after he was seriously injured in an Israeli bombing that targeted his house in the Sabra neighbourhood south of Gaza City two days earlier.
Abu Sharia was initially taken to the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in central Gaza City, before he was shifted to the Indonesian Hospital due to the seriousness of his injuries.
Journalists operating in the Palestinian territory are faced with increased dangers as they report on the conflict amidst Israeli ground assaults and airstrikes, they suffer disrupted communications, supply shortages, and power outages.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7th after Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory operation into the occupied territories.
Concomitantly with the war, the regime has been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory into a trickle.
So far, during the military onslaught, the regime has killed at least 37,900 Gazans, most of them women, children, and adolescents. Another 87,060 Palestinians have also sustained injuries.
- Israeli forces have abducted nearly 9,500 Palestinians in violent raids across the occupied West Bank since the regime’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip started last October.
The revelation was made in a joint statement by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society on Sunday.
The statement noted that the occupying regime’s forces have abducted more than 9,450 Palestinians in the West Bank, including in the occupied city of Jerusalem, during the same period.
The two Palestinian organisations said the figure included those who were abducted from their homes and at military checkpoints, as well as those who surrendered under pressure, and those who were taken by Israeli forces as hostages.
The statement added that at least 20 Palestinians, including siblings and former prisoners, have been abducted by Israeli forces during the past two days alone in various parts of the West Bank, including the cities of al-Khalil, also known as Hebron, Tulkarm, Nablus, and al-Quds (Jerusalem).
These figures do not include thousands of Palestinian adults and children that Israeli forces have detained, tortured and interrogated in makeshift prisons across Gaza, outside any legal or civilian oversight.
Israeli forces have abducted dozens of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, despite the fact that the military had to halt around 20 arrests of activists in the area due to its already overcrowded prisons.
The development came despite the fact that the regime is facing problems keeping Palestinian abductees in its already overcrowded prisons.
Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, recently reported that the regime’s military and the so-called internal security service, Shin Bet, have been forced to cancel a number of arrest campaigns due to a lack of space in prisons.
Meanwhile, conditions for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have worsened considerably with detainees experiencing limited access to essential rights, including food, water, electricity, medical care, family visits, and legal assistance.
While the Palestinian media say nearly a dozen inmates have died in Israeli prisons since the onslaught on Gaza started, an investigation by Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that the number is actually more than two dozen.
Various rights groups, however, have put the number even higher.
Over 8,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli military forces in the occupied West Bank since the onset of the war on Gaza. The number has now surged to 8,165 since October 7th 2023.
Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, the regime’s brutal crackdown on the West Bank has also escalated, resulting in near-daily raids into villages and cities across the occupied territory.
Nearly 550 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or extremist Jewish settlers since the Gaza war began.
The regime’s genocide in Gaza has also killed more than 37,800 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while leaving nearly 87,000 others injured.
