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.
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 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.
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.
