Human rights lawyer Nadia Daqqa, who works at the Israel-based rights organization HaMoked, told Sky News that depositions obtained from Ofer prisoner revealed Al-Bursh was tortured before his death in the prison where he was held as a detainee since April 2024.
"The prison guards assaulted him and 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 Adnan Al-Bursh dead, according to the deposition.
"Adnan Al-Bursh was not the first case of a person who was beaten and died in that prison since this war started. Before him, there were many, many cases," said Daqqa.
The Israeli authorities announced his death at the time without providing a cause of death nor returning his body to the family.
The Israeli Prison Service denied in a statement to Sky News its responsibility for Al-Bursh's death, stressing the "professionalism" of its prison guards.
Adnan Al-Bursh, born in Gaza under Israeli occupation in 1974, chose to work in the strip after earning a medical degree in Europe, spending nearly three decades as an orthopaedic surgeon treating hundreds of patients at various hospitals in the strip.
The Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, left many of the 100,000-plus injured with severe bone fractures that require life-saving surgeries.
Al-Bursh chose to stay in the strip and use his expertise as an orthopaedic surgeon to save as many lives as possible despite all the dangers.
The Sky News report on the torture-to-death of Adnan Al-Bursh comes less than two weeks after the Palestinian Prisoners' Affairs Commission (PPA) said prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti was subjected to a brutal assault by Israeli prison guards in Megiddo Prison in early September.
Human rights organizations, including some Israeli rights groups, have long documented widespread torture applied against several thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails, many of whom were in jail with trial for decades.
Since the start of the Israeli genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023, rights lawyers and families have documented that Israeli prison guards increased their use of torture techniques - including beatings and starvation - against Palestinian political prisoners.
Hamas and Palestinian groups have demanded that thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails - whose numbers jumped by more than 11,000 after mass arrests by the Israeli army in the West Bank since October 2023, be released in exchange for releasing the remaining 100 Israelis captured on 7 October.
A story of resilience
During the opening weeks of the Israeli war on Gaza, which started on 7 October 2023, Al-Bursh worked tirelessly to operate on Gazans suffering bone fractures and other severe injuries as a result of Israeli bombardments at Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, the largest hospital in the strip.
As the Israeli army began cutting off all medical supplies and electrical power to Al-Shifa, Al-Bursh documented operating on patients under gruelling circumstances.
“Despite the pain, we are steadfast,” he said as he posted Kafkaesque video footage of operating on a patient in a dark OR using a mobile phone flashlight.
In December, as the Israeli army shelling of Al-Shifa escalated in November, a defiant Al-Bursh posted videos online to refute Israeli unfounded allegations that Hamas was operating "a command and control centre" out of "a bunker under the complex."
Video footage also showed him using a shovel to help colleagues bury the victims of Israeli bombardment in mass graves on the grounds of the hospital.
Al-Bursh left the Al-Shifa - with his coworkers and hundreds of patients - after Israeli troops ransacked the complex and put it out of service in mid-November.
He first enlisted to operate on patients wounded in Israeli bombardment at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza.
Video footage dating to November 2023 showed him bloodied after an Israeli strike targeted the hospital.
Another video showed surgeons operating on him amid a total electrical power outage in the hospital.
The Israeli army forced him, medical staff, and patients to evacuate the Indonesian Hospital on two separate occasions.
Al-Bursh then enlisted to treat patients and perform life-saving operations at Al Awda Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Several days later, on 19 December 2023, the Israeli army arrested Al-Bursh with all men aged 14-65 at Al-Awda Hospital after threatening to blow up the whole hospital.
In tears, Orthopedic Surgeon Mohammad Obeid, a colleague of Al-Bursh, told Sky News that Al-Bursh, along with all the boys and men, surrendered to the Israeli army because it threatened to blow up the hospital if they did not.
Obeid said Al-Bursh, along with five medical workers, was led away by the Israeli soldiers and was beaten.
Al-Bursh was detained with tens of other Palestinian prisoners at the Israeli military base Sde Teiman, which has been used to process detainees since the early days of the war.
General Surgeon Khaled Hamouda, who was detained at Sde Teiman with Al-Bursh, told Sky News that Al-Bursh was beaten so severely by the guards he could not walk to the toilet by himself."
Hamouda told the British channel that Al-Bursh was beaten by guards at the military base.
Al-Bursh was transferred to the notorious Ofer Prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in mid-April 2024.
In October, a UN three-person commission concluded that "Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza."
Israel is "committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities," the commission said in its report.
It found that thousands of Palestinians who were detained by the Israeli army in Gaza, including children, have been subjected to "widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence."
The commission also confirmed that the "institutionalized mistreatment of Palestinian detainees" took place "under direct orders" from the Israeli cabinet.
RIP Adnan Al-Bursh (1974-2024).
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