'A nightmare': Gaza doctor released after being detained in Israeli prisons for over 6 months
CBC
Palestinian surgeon Dr. Khaled Al Serr was working at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on March 25 when he was arrested and detained in a raid by Israeli troops.
For months, his family had no knowledge of his whereabouts until other detained health-care workers were released and informed Al Serr's loved ones about where he was.
After spending more than six months in Israeli custody, the 32-year-old doctor was released on Sept. 29 from Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank, without any charges or trial.
"It was like a nightmare," Al Serr told CBC News of his detainment, two days after he was released and let back into Gaza.
While in custody, the doctor alleges he was tortured, humiliated and denied adequate access to medical care by soldiers and prison guards.
"I was lucky that I [came] back to my family with a complete body … I did not lose my feet. Some of the prisoners there had an infection due to the dogs there that bit their leg — and some of them due to the health-care negligence there."
He said when Israeli forces raided the hospital, staff had been trying to clean and reorganize it so they could reopen to patients. The facility closed in February following an earlier raid on the hospital that devastated much of the upper floor and stripped it of supplies.
Al Serr's experience is one that hundreds of health-care workers in Gaza have undergone. Roughly 300 health-care workers from Gaza remain in custody after being arbitrarily detained by Israeli forces while on duty, according to the enclave's Health Ministry. At least 145 of them are doctors — roughly seven per cent of the estimated 2,110 physicians remaining in Gaza. The raids and subsequent detainments, international rights organizations say, are devastating to an already fragile health-care system.
Since June, Amnesty International had repeatedly called on Israeli forces for Al Serr's immediate release, adding that his fate and whereabouts remained largely unknown to his family until July.
The global human rights group says Al Serr was detained along with other medical staff in the Nasser Hospital raid, also calling for the military to disclose the whereabouts of all Palestinian health workers who it says were "forcibly disappeared."
CBC News reached out to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to ask about Al Serr's arrest and the number of health-care workers in custody, but it said it could not provide any information or confirm any details.
In a statement, it said in its offensive on Gaza that "suspects of terrorist activities were arrested," adding that the individuals were taken for "further detention and questioning" in Israel.
Palestinians found not to have been involved in "terrorist activity" are released back to Gaza, the IDF said.
After the raid In February, Israel accused Hamas of regularly using medical facilities for military purposes, and it has aired footage taken by its troops that it says shows tunnels containing weapons below some hospitals.
A year into the Israel-Hamas war, foreign journalists have still not been allowed inside Gaza except on a limited number of supervised tours organized by the Israel Defence Forces. In the absence of that coverage, citizens and journalists inside Gaza have picked up their phones and cameras to document the devastation that the war has wrought and their resilience in the face of it.