Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.
“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,” he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”
Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa says he was dragged from the operating room before being handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped.
He was then put in a military truck with other doctors, nurses and medical staff and driven away from the hospital. Less than 24 hours later he was in a detention facility in Israel, beginning what he describes as months of brutal and constant violence and abuse.
“There were no rules,” he says.
During interrogations, he says he was tortured and beaten. “They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside,” he says.
“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing.”
Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth: “They have no humanity.”
Under international law, healthcare workers like Abu Ajwa should be protected from attacks by warring parties and be allowed to continue providing medical care to all who need it.
Yet by the time the January ceasefire came into effect, more than 1,000 medical staff across Gaza had been killed and many hospitals bombed to rubble – attacks which a UN Human Rights Council commission concluded amounted to war crimes.
Hundreds more medical staff who survived the airstrikes and ground assaults were arrested, illegally transferred across the border and disappeared into Israeli prisons, including dozens of doctors.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 297 doctors, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare workers from Gaza were detained by Israel during the war.
Palestinian medical NGO Healthcare Workers Watch says it believes the number is slightly higher and that it has verified that 339 healthcare workers from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military, with at least 160 still inside Israeli prison facilities.
In interviews with the Guardian and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), seven of Gaza’s most senior doctors have given harrowing testimonies of the torture, beatings, starvation and humiliation they say they suffered during months of detention.
All of those interviewed say they were targeted because they were doctors. Most were arrested inside hospitals as they worked; others were taken from ambulances or detained at checkpoints after being identified as healthcare workers. All those doctors interviewed were detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza they say might pose a security threat.
Some, including Abu Ajwa, believe they were singled out for extreme violence by prison guards and interrogators because they were doctors.
“One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I was a senior consultant surgeon they should work hard to make sure that I lost [the use of my hands] and became unable to perform surgery,” he says.
He says he was handcuffed for 24 hours a day and interrogators used planks with chains to restrain his hands for hours at a time. “They said they wanted to make sure I could never return to work.”
None of the senior doctors interviewed say they were given an explanation for their detention. All were released without charge after months of imprisonment.
The UN Human Rights Office said the mass detention of healthcare workers has had a catastrophic impact on civilians, denying injured and sick patients – as well as junior medical staff – access to the decades of medical skills of senior medics and has been a clear contributing factor in the almost total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.
“Israel must immediately release all those held arbitrarily, including medical staff, and end all practices that amount to enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment,” the UN said in a statement given to the Guardian. “Those responsible for crimes under international law must be held to account.”
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, was arrested at a checkpoint while travelling with a convoy of patients in ambulances after the Israeli army told him to evacuate the hospital in November 2023.
“When I told them my name, they pointed their weapons at me and their laser [sights] at my head and chest and I was immediately detained … as if they were waiting for me, as if they had seized a big prize,” he says.
“They beat me with rifle butts and chairs,” he says. “After that, they poured sand over my head and shoved dirt into my mouth.
“I was on the floor on my knees with a blindfold and they were beating me … after this I was put in a vehicle, myself and many others piled on top of each other in a humiliating and degrading way,” he says. “Everyone was screaming, everyone was crying out ‘we don’t know where we’re going.’ The beating was constant.”
All of the doctors interviewed by the Guardian and ARIJ reported the same pattern of identification, detention, transfer to Israel and incarceration, and then being moved multiple times between Israeli-run prisons during their captivity.
In these facilities they say they were subjected to terrifying and inhumane treatment including being constantly beaten and kept in stress positions for hours at a time and having loud music played constantly to prevent them from sleeping.
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” says Abu Selmia.
“I am talking about being clubbed, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there.
“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
In their testimonies, the doctors say they were also denied food and water, with some forced to eat toothpaste for lack of anything else. They said they were not allowed to wash or change their clothes, sometimes for months at a time.
Dr Mahmoud Abu Shehada, head of orthopaedic surgery at Nasser hospital, was arrested at work on 16 February 2024. “All the medical staff were told to leave. We [were] lined up between the administration building and the old Nasser building,” he says.
“We were subjected to severe beatings from Friday afternoon to the early hours of Saturday morning. It was a brutal night of assault and abuse. We were stripped naked; it was cold, and they deliberately sprayed us with cold water.”
Abu Shehada spent around three months in different detention centres, where he says he suffered “daily humiliations and torture” before being transferred to Israel’s desert Negev prison.
“In Negev prison, the detainees were suffering from skin diseases, scabies and severe infections with pus and discharge on the skin,” he says.
“After a while the infection spread to us. Weakness and fatigue took over to the point where many of us could barely stand.”
Dr Bassam Miqdad, head of orthopaedic surgery at the European hospital in Gaza, was detained after being stopped at a military checkpoint and spent seven months in Israeli prisons.
“There were Israeli nurses and doctors there but they wouldn’t even look at you,” he says. “I saw people with broken limbs and the guards would pull them around. They would ask, ‘where does it hurt?’ and then beat you on that injury.”
Miqdad said he found it very difficult to recount the violence and humiliation he says he was subjected to in Israeli prisons.
“It was not just the beatings [but] the way they treated us like we were not human,” he says. “In Nafha prison, they kept telling us to howl like dogs.”
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian associate professor of surgery, who volunteered as a doctor in Gaza during the early stages of the war, says the psychological impact of the “performative” nature of the humiliation and torture of senior medical staff in prisons is “beyond devastating”.
“These are some of the most revered, most respected and senior members of their communities,” he says. “It is nothing short of a deliberate attempt to subjugate and violate the whole of Gazan society.”
To date, two of Gaza’s most senior doctors have died in Israeli detention. Dr Iyad al-Rantisi, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Kamal Adwan hospital, died at Shikma prison.
Dr Adnan al-Bursh, head of the orthopaedic department at al-Shifa hospital, died shortly after being transferred to Ofer prison in April 2024, with former detainees claiming that he died from torture and had suffered severe sexual violence in the hours before his death.
Reports of torture, violence and psychological abuse of healthcare workers have been verified by the UN and published in reports by organisations such as HWW, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.
In a HWW report from October 2024, healthcare workers who had been locked inside Israeli detention facilities gave testimonies of being electrocuted, hung by their arms from ceilings, being sexually assaulted and having their genitals mutilated.
A doctor told the Guardian and ARIJ that he witnessed sexual assaults while in Israeli detention and tried to help treat a healthcare worker who had been raped by prison guards.
“A prisoner … had a baton inserted into him,” said Dr Khaled Serr, a surgeon at Nasser hospital, who was detained in Israeli prisons for more than six months before being released without charge.
“The assault was so violent that it caused severe muscle tears in his rectum. Even after his release, he continues to suffer. We performed multiple surgeries on him, but they have not been successful.”
Prof Nick Maynard, a senior surgical consultant at Oxford hospitals who worked in hospitals in Gaza during the war, said the arbitrary detention of hundreds of medical staff in Israeli prisons set a “chilling” precedent.
“We have just witnessed a war in which hundreds of medical staff, including some of Gaza’s most experienced medical staff, are dragged away from their patients and thrown in prisons for months at a time and tortured with impunity in breach of the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian laws,” he says.
“It is a deliberate attempt to terrorise, hollow out and disable an already depleted and traumatised healthcare workforce. It will have inevitably led to the deaths of many civilians,” the professor says.
Israel has defended its attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system by claiming hospitals were being used by Hamas as military command or operation centres.
Under international law, healthcare facilities can lose their protected status and become military targets if they are used for acts “harmful to the enemy”.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said: “If these allegations were verified, this would raise serious concerns that Palestinian armed groups were using the presence of civilians to intentionally shield themselves from attack, which would amount to a war crime.
“However, insufficient information has so far been made available to substantiate these allegations, which have remained vague and broad, and in some cases appear contradicted by publicly available information.
The Guardian put all the doctors’ allegations relating to their detention to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which did not respond to the individual cases but provided a general statement in which it said it was “operating to restore security to the citizens of Israel, to bring home the hostages, and to achieve the objectives of the war while operating by international law.
“During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, suspects of terrorist activities were arrested. The relevant suspects have been taken for further detention and questioning in Israel. Those who are not involved in terrorist activity are released back to the Gaza Strip as soon as possible.”
The IDF says that it provides each detainee with clothing, a mattress, regular food and drink, and that they have access to medical care. It said that handcuffing of detainees occurs in accordance with IDF policies. It was aware of incidents where people had died in detention and that investigations were conducted for each of these deaths.
“The IDF acts in accordance with Israeli and international law in order to protect the rights of the detainees held in the detention and questioning facilities,” it said.
For the families of those doctors who have disappeared into detention, the absence of information about their loved ones is a daily agony.
In December, the Israeli authorities faced international condemnation for the arrest of paediatrician Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, who was last seen in Israeli drone footage in his white coat walking through the rubble of his hospital towards a line of Israeli tanks. His family say he was held in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp. The Israeli authorities say they suspect him of being a Hamas militant.
A lawyer representing Abu Safiya was last week allowed to visit the doctor in Ofer prison for the first time and said Abu Safiya had been tortured, beaten and denied medical treatment.
“We are deeply worried about his fate as he was already injured [when he was detained],” says his son Elyas Abu Safiya, who has been campaigning for his release. “We are living in a state of shock.”
Dr Ahmad Mhanna, head of al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza, has been in Israeli detention for more than one year without charge.
Last November, Mhanna was able to dictate a letter to his family.
In it, he tells his wife: “I miss you so much and I am waiting for the moment I can see you and the children. I have so many plans for us to do together once I am out of prison.
“I want you to stay strong. I know the burden is heavy but you can handle it, I have complete faith in you. I love you very much.”
Since he was released from detention, Abu Ajwa has not managed to fix his broken teeth but has gone back to work in Gaza’s shattered healthcare system.
“As for the interrogator who was determined to make me lose sensation in my hands, I say: ‘no matter what you do … I am a doctor, and I will practice my profession. I will always continue, until my last breath, to be in the operating theatre.”
Additional reporting by Kaamil Ahmed, Zarifa Abou Qoura and Aseel Mousa
