A Palestinian paramedic’s ordeal in Israeli detention
Walid Khalili on duty as a paramedic and ambulance driver with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, on 12 May 2023
Milena Ansari reports for Human Rights Watch on 26 August 2024:
Walid Khalili’s nightmare began on the morning of November 10, 2023. The 36-year-old father of three, a Palestinian Medical Relief Society paramedic and ambulance driver, had been dispatched to the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City to rescue four wounded men. When his ambulance reached the Barcelona Garden, twenty meters from the Labor Ministry building, on Mughrabi Street, he saw four men surrounded by Israeli forces.
“I saw the four men being executed in cold blood,” Khalili said. “I saw it with my own eyes, I was three meters away. When they were shot, I hid under the ambulance, and next to it there was a building, so then I ran inside the building. The Israeli forces raided the building and started yelling at me to raise my hands.” Soldiers kicked and beat him with their rifle butts, breaking his ribs.
Human Rights Watch could not independently verify Khalili’s account of the killings. But his subsequent ordeal – including deportation from Gaza to detention facilities in Israel, torture, and denial of medical care – are consistent with the abuses in Israeli detention described by seven other healthcare workers we interviewed. His account is also consistent with reports by other rights groups, the United Nations human rights office, and journalists.
The soldiers forced Khalili to strip naked in public, zip-tied his hands behind his back, blindfolded him, took him to another location. “They kept telling me, ‘Say you’re Hamas,’” he said. He recalled the bitter November cold. Soldiers then placed him in an open-back military vehicle, hit him, and drove him to an open area, where he was forced to lie face-down on sandy ground. Soldiers repeatedly shoved his face into the sand with their boots and threatened to kill him, Khalili said.