Beatings, diseases, humiliation: A Palestinian doctor’s year in Israeli jails
Dr. Abu Shahada after his release from Israeli detention, January 2025
Ruwaida Kamal Amer reports in +972 on 18 February 2025:
Amid the haze of the Israeli army’s manifold raids on medical facilities in the Gaza Strip over the past year and a half, it is easy to lose sight of their human impact. The story of Dr. Mahmoud Abu Shahada, the chief of orthopedics at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, helps to reveal their arbitrary brutality and cruelty.
Abu Shahada was one of 70 medical staff arrested along with dozens of patients on Feb. 17, 2024, during Israel’s invasion of the hospital. The arrests were the culmination of a nearly month-long siege on Gaza’s second largest medical facility, where troops fired on the hospital and its courtyard, demolished of the complex’s northern wall, targeted its water tanks, and cut off electricity.
Abu Shahada had not taken any part in the fighting, his lawyer says, but Israel detained him for nearly a year, subjecting him to persistent abuse and forcing him to live in harsh conditions. Following an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court, Abu Shahada was finally released on Jan. 10. He spoke to +972 shortly after, in an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
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What happened on the day of your arrest?
The soldiers lined all of the doctors up in front of the administration building and ordered us to take off our clothes. They checked our identity, blindfolded us, handcuffed us, and led us into the basement of one of the buildings, where they humiliated, insulted, and severely beat us.
From Friday afternoon until Saturday morning, we endured a difficult night of beating and abuse. The weather was cold and we were naked and they sprayed us with cold water. At dawn, they loaded us into large open trucks and transported us to detention centers. They were driving fast and I could feel the truck shaking from the roughness of the road.
During the transport, they sprayed us again with cold water and beat us until we reached the detention centers. They dragged us out of the trucks in a very humiliating way and beat us again, before once more verifying our identities and dressing us in pants and a pullover.
The detention centers were enclosed by barbed wire and chains, resembling cages. They put us in holding cells and each one had a mattress no thicker than a centimeter that we sat on all day, still handcuffed and blindfolded. For two months, we were constantly transferred to interrogation rooms, while being subjected to humiliation and torture.
We were then transferred to Ofer Camp, which consisted of many rooms containing approximately 15 to 20 prisoners each. Our hands were cuffed and only after two full days did they remove our blindfolds. The beating and abuse continued. Two or three times each day, masked soldiers would enter and move us from room to room, beating and humiliating us, while taking all the food and water and throwing it away outside.