A new report on Thursday revealed chilling new details of the circumstances surrounding the killing of the famous Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh in an Israeli prison in May.
A captive at Israel’s Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank told Sky News how Israeli forces left Dr Al-Bursh, who had been severely tortured, to die alone in agonising pain and naked from the waist down in the prison’s yard.
The captive, who previously knew Dr Al-Bursh in Gaza, provided details in a deposition to lawyers from the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked.
“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 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 dead).”
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.
“[The director] told us that the [Israeli army] have full data of all males aged between 14 and 65 at Awda hospital,” his colleague Dr Mohammad Obeid told Sky News,. “They told him that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it,” he added.
After Dr Al-Bursh left he hospital, Israeli soldiers “called his name out” and then “roughly” took him away, according to Obeid.
Dr Al-Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev, which whistleblowers and former inmates have likened to a concentration camp.
Reports of physical, mental, and sexual abuse are widespread at Sde Teiman, with instances of rape so severe that prisoners have been died and seriously injured.. Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate of the Sde Teiman camp, told Sky News that many of the prisoners held there were medical professionals.
It is here that Al-Bursh underwent brutal torture, being viciously beaten by Israeli guards. The full extent of his torture is not known.
“He thought he may have broken ribs,” Dr Hamouda said. “He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”
It was after this that Dr. Al-Bursh was sent to Ofer Prison where he would die within weeks.
Israel has accused Dr Al-Bursh of being a “terrorist”, yet, like most of the captives in both Sde Teiman and Ofer prison, he was never charged with any criminal offenses.
Dozens of Palestinian captives have been killed in Israeli detention since 7 October, with numerous cases of them having been subject to extreme torture.
At least 43,764 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since it launched its war on Gaza.
