Gaza doctor 'raped, tortured to death' in Israeli custody, new report reveals

A recently released report by the UK-based Sky News revealed chilling new details about the torture, including sexual abuse, and subsequent murder of famous Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh in an Israeli prison in May.

The report citing a captive at Israel's Ofer Prison, detailed how Israeli forces left the severely tortured Dr Al-Bursh, naked from the waist down, to die alone in agonising pain in the prison's yard.

"In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body," the captive detailed in a deposition to lawyers from the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked.

"The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was martyred," the captive told the lawyers.

Dr Al-Bursh was widely regarded as one of the best qualified and well known surgeons in the Palestinian enclave, with a picture of him in 2018, covered in the blood of a victim of Israeli bombing, going viral and catapulting him to a grim form of fame.

When Israel's war on Gaza broke out in October of last year, Dr Al-Bursh worked at al-Shifa hospital as the head of orthopaedic surgery. By November, Israel had the hospital under siege forcing Dr Al-Bursh, along with all the staff and patients, to flee.

After serving at the Indonesian hospital in Bait Lahia and documenting Israeli forces besieging and firing indiscriminately at patients and staff, killing 12, he was once again ordered to leave as Israel systematically destroyed Gaza's health system.

Dr Al-Bursh then moved to Al-Awda hospital in Gaza's north, where Israeli forces familiarly surrounded and besieged. It was here that Al-Bursh was taken by Israeli forces.

According to the report, Dr Al-Bursh was taken to the notorious Sde Teiman prison which has been described by Israeli lawyers to be "more horrific than Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo".

On 6 August, Israeli media outlet Channel 12 released a harrowing video showing soldiers at the prison, situated in the Negev desert in southern Israel, gang-raping a Palestinian detainee.

Multiple media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, have revealed shocking details of rape and sexual assault at Sde Teiman. Palestinian prisoners released from the detention camp have testified of witnessing multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.

According to the Sky News report, Dr Al-Bursh went through similar kind of brutal torture at the prison which left him with serious injuries and unable to walk.

"He was beaten very badly. He thought he may have broken ribs. He was unable to even go to the toilet alone," Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate of the Sde Teiman camp, told Sky News.

Dr Al-Bursh was then sent to the Ofer Prison where he would die within weeks.

Meanwhile, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese called out "the racism of Western media" who are not covering the story of "a stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics".

"And Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening," she said on X (Twitter).