https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/31/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine/In late March 2024 Israeli soldiers raided Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. They arrested medical staff and patients, as well as civilians who were sheltering in the hospital compound. H., an orthopedic doctor, was partway through a shift when the soldiers began beating him. They kicked him in the stomach, groin, and testicles, told him to take his clothes off, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and escorted him to the hospital yard. Then they drove him across the Israeli border to the infamous Sde Teiman military base, near the southern city of Be’er Sheva, where at the time hundreds of Palestinians were being held blindfolded and shackled in overcrowded, filthy cages, some forced to sleep on the floor without mattresses or blankets.
In October 2024 H. gave an affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), a nonprofit where one of us, Guy Shalev, is the executive director and another, Osama Tanous, is a board member. H. recounted that at one point during his sixty-nine days at Sde Teiman his guards put him in a “disco room” with no mattresses, where deafening music blared at all times. Eventually they took him to an interrogation room, where, he testified, “for six days they tortured me by tying my hands and feet to a chair behind my back, hitting my stomach, and slapping me while I was blindfolded.” After forty-three days at Sde Teiman, he was sent to a prison not far from Tel Aviv to be interrogated.
There he saw a doctor, who affirmed that H. had developed inguinal and abdominal hernias as a result of the beatings. “He said I needed surgery and should not be interrogated,” H. said. But he was sent back to Sde Teiman without treatment. “As soon as I returned to the detention facility,” H. recounted, “the soldiers beat me up, banged my head on the ground and rubbed my face in the sand, kicked me and punched me.”
After another three weeks at Sde Teiman, they transferred H. once again, to a prison facility in Ashkelon, near the Gaza border. There he was seen by another doctor, who made him keep his blindfold on during the examination. “We are colleagues in the same profession,” H. said. “You are supposed to treat me humanely.” In response, he remembered, the Israeli doctor “slapped me while I was still blindfolded.” “You are a terrorist,” he recalls the man saying.
A few weeks later, at the Israel Prison Service’s medical facility in Ramleh, H. met with yet a third doctor, who confirmed in a ten-minute exam that he needed a hernia operation—yet the doctor insisted it was not urgent and H. was again returned, this time to Ofer prison. H. recalls in the affidavit that at a court hearing last July the judge extended his detention for forty-five days; neither there nor in the following interrogations was he given access to a lawyer. In August, when he appeared before a judge in a phone hearing, he was told that he is considered “affiliated with a terror organization.” Before the judge abruptly hung up the call, he told H. that he would be remanded to Ofer until further notice. “I am a doctor,” H. protested. Then the judge was gone.
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