Gaza: NGOs say two Palestinians, including a prominent doctor, died from “torture” in Israeli prison

New allegations of torture in an Israeli prison. Two Gaza prisoners, including a doctor from Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, have died behind Israeli bars, two Palestinian detainees’ rights groups said on Thursday, saying they died from “torture” and neglect.

In a joint statement, the Prisoners’ Club and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Committee announced the death of “two detainees from the Gaza Strip”, including “Dr. Adnane Ahmed Atiyah al-Burcha, 50-year-old (…) head of the Orthopedics Department of Al-Shifa Hospital ” The other inmate who died was reported to be Abdel Bari Rajab Khadir, 33.

Both died “as a result of torture and medical crimes whose victims are detainees in the Gaza Strip,” the associations say, referring to the neglect regularly denounced by Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists.

Doctor Burch, a figure in Gaza hospitals

The Hamas Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip condemned the “murder… by torture” of Dr. Burch, saying his death brings to 492 the number of medical workers killed since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October. 7 as a result of an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement. The Israeli army told AFP it was “not informed” of such facts.

Dr. Burch was known to Palestinians for his media interviews in which he described the situation at hospitals in the Gaza Strip, which were attacked by the Israeli army, which accuses Hamas of using them as bases of operations. Arrested “by the occupying army in December 2023 in a hospital” in the north of the Palestinian territory, he died in Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank on April 19, according to two associations, which indicate that his remains “are there.” always preserved.” Dr. Burch was injured “five months ago,” they said, without specifying his medical condition at the time of his arrest.

Several figures have paid tribute to him, including Dr Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a Palestinian-British surgeon present in the Gaza Strip at the start of the war, who wrote of X: he was “tortured to death by the Israeli army in one of his secret camps for detainees; he was a wonderful surgeon, full of life.”

The Prisoners’ Club says at least 18 Palestinian detainees have died since October 7, a number “set to rise given reports of torture and brutality.” The Israeli army launched an investigation on December 19 following the deaths in custody of several Palestinians detained in the Gaza Strip since October 7.