Four Palestinian medical professionals died in Israeli custody, and many others were tortured or otherwise mistreated, according to a recent Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) report.
The four are part of a larger 70-person Palestinian death toll out of several thousand prisoners who have been in Israeli custody, some of them for nearly 18 months.
Broadly speaking, the IDF rejects the allegations, although it has already indicted six reservist prison guards for beating or sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners. It vaguely acknowledged this fact in its response to the report, saying it probes “exceptional conduct” by prison guards.
Already in the early months of the Israel-Hamas War, the IDF acknowledged about 30 Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody, and it made probing the issue one of its largest investigations.
In July, The Jerusalem Post learned that Military Advocate-General Maj.-Gen. Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi would cite the complicated nature of the Sde Teiman detention center cases, from where most of the early war death and beating allegations stem from. Some of the detainees were badly wounded on the battlefield and died in the facility, in all likelihood, from their wounds.
She hoped she could move forward faster in cases of detainees who came to Sde Teiman fully healthy and only later were wounded or died.
Even with those cases, however, the IDF legal division faced a massive delay in receiving professional medical opinions regarding wounds or the cause of death. To illustrate the dilemma, how can it be determined whether a death was caused by strangulation, a series of blows to the body, or a naturally occurring heart attack?
The state’s medical forensics institute has been overwhelmed in trying to advance all of these questions since the October 7 massacre, and the depressing and unprecedented volume of work has decimated the staff size.
Regarding one soldier who committed suicide, for example, it took seven or eight months to get a medical opinion.Even the indictments against the six soldiers were only filed in recent months, suggesting that a report on the detainees who died may take more time.
According to the PHRI report, 250 Palestinian medical professionals have been detained during the war, and 70 have been released so far.
PHRI claims Israel arrested many medical professionals, trying to receive intel on Hamas
One of the main arguments made by PHRI is that Israel arrested many medical professionals on shabby evidence, hoping to use them to glean intelligence about Hamas. It later released them after several months without filing charges.
This happened with Khaled Alser, a doctor who was released after more than six months, the report said.
According to the IDF, many of the medical professionals were terrorists pretending to be medical professionals or actual staff working with terrorists. But it did not explicitly deny trying to gather intelligence from certain detainees who were later released.
Most of the detainees have not been indicted to date, and it took PHRI six months to locate most of them, although it did acknowledge visiting and interviewing 24 of them between July and December 2024, the report said.
“As doctors, seeing our colleagues abducted from their workplaces, detained for months without charges in subhuman conditions, cruelly tortured, sexually abused, and denied medical treatment is something we cannot live with, and neither should any of us,” the PHRI report said.
“Almost 150 medical workers are still incarcerated under these conditions and can still be saved if enough pressure is put on the Israeli government to release them,” it said.
According to the report, Israel has targeted “doctors as a weapon against the population: Without medical staff to treat the civilian population, Gaza’s healthcare system has almost ceased to exist.”
Despite these claims, the report seems to ignore mountains of evidence that Hamas systematically used many hospitals as command centers and not just for patients who needed help for their wounds.
Even in the fall of 2023, the IDF had found signs of hostages being held at Rantisi Hospital. At Shifa Hospital, there were huge quantities of Hamas weapons, along with a key tunnel command center connected to the hospital.After the IDF left Shifa Hospital, Hamas returned and the IDF arrested several hundred additional terrorists there in March 2024.
In response to the report, the IDF said the PHRI position paper raises many claims that in some instances are inexact and in others completely baseless, which – intentionally or not – prop up disinformation promoted by Hamas.
During the war, the IDF said it had arrested terrorist suspects, including hospital staff or persons pretending to be hospital staff but who were really terrorists.
Those who were arrested were interrogated and vetted, and anyone who was found to not be involved in terrorism was freed and returned to Gaza, although sometimes this took some time due to the ongoing war and unstable security situation there, the IDF said.
Allegations of solitary confinement and being kept concealed are untrue, as the detainees were given access to legal representation as required by law, it said.
Moreover, every detainee underwent a medical evaluation upon arriving for detention and received additional medical attention as needed, including being sent to a hospital if required, the IDF said.
Conditions in detention centers are reviewed by inspectors periodically, including sometimes by judges, and any cases of a departure from the proper treatment of detainees is probed by the Military Police, it said.
Regarding claims of torture, the specific claims have not been previously reported, and if additional sufficient information is referred to the military, the allegations will be probed, the IDF said.
The Post queried the Israel Prisons Services on the matter but had not received a response by press time.