Gazans ‘shackled and blindfolded’ at Israel hospital

Medical workers in Israel have told the BBC that Palestinian detainees from Gaza are routinely kept shackled to hospital beds, blindfolded, sometimes naked, and forced to wear nappies – a practice one medic said amounted to “torture”. A whistle-blower detailed how procedures in one military hospital were “routinely” carried out without painkillers, causing “an unacceptable amount of pain” to detainees.

Another whistle-blower said painkillers were used “selectively” and “in a very limited way” during an invasive medical procedure on a Gazan detainee in a public hospital. He also said critically ill patients being held in makeshift military facilities were being denied proper treatment because of a reluctance by public hospitals to transfer and treat them.

One detainee, taken from Gaza for questioning by the Israeli army and later released, told the BBC his leg had to be amputated because he was denied treatment for an infected wound. A senior doctor working inside the military hospital at the centre of the allegations denied that any amputations were the direct result of conditions there, but described the shackles and other restraints used by guards as “dehumanisation”.

The Israeli army said detainees at the facility were treated “appropriately and carefully”. The two whistle-blowers the BBC spoke to were both in positions to assess the medical treatment of detainees. Both asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue among their colleagues.Their accounts are supported by a report, published in February by Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, which said that Israel’s civilian and military prisons had become “an apparatus of retribution and revenge” and that detainees’ human rights were being violated - in particular their right to health.

Concerns over the treatment of sick and injured detainees have centred on a military field hospital, at the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel. The field hospital was set up by Israel’s Health Ministry after the Hamas attacks specifically to treat Gazan detainees, after some public hospitals and staff expressed a reluctance to treat fighters captured on the day of the Hamas attacks. Since then, Israeli forces have rounded up large numbers of people from Gaza and taken them to bases like Sde Teiman for interrogation. Those suspected of fighting for Hamas are sent to Israeli detention centres; many others are released back to Gaza without charge. The army does not publish details of the detainees it is holding.