Prominent Israeli writer Gideon Levy criticized Israel’s immoral dealings with the Palestinians, against the backdrop of the horrific torture to which Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh was subjected, leading to his death inside an occupation prison.
In his article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Levy describes Dr. Adnan as a surgeon and head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. He was a handsome man with an attractive and influential personality who used social media to document the work he was doing in “incomprehensible” circumstances. There is no electricity, medicine, or anesthesia, and often no beds.
He appeared in one of the video clips, carrying a shovel in his hand, digging a mass grave in the hospital courtyard for deceased patients after the refrigerators were filled with bodies. Levy said that Al-Barsh became a local hero during his lifetime, and internationally after his death.
Levy: Al-Barsh became a local hero during his lifetime, and internationally after his death.
His widow, Yasmine, was quoted as saying that he barely returned home after the outbreak of war. He and his medical team were forced to flee three hospitals that were destroyed by the Israeli army “in strict compliance with international law,” a comment that expresses painful irony and sarcasm from an army that prides itself on respecting that law.
Levy – a leftist writer hated by the occupying state – recounted details about the Israeli army’s arrest of Al-Barsh, last December, from Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia – the last medical facility he worked in – when they summoned him outside the hospital and kidnapped him.
He explained that he was subjected to “horrible” torture during the few months he spent in an interrogation center for the General Security Service (Shin Bet), and later in the Sde Teman detention camp, to the point that a Palestinian doctor who saw him in the detention center said that he barely recognized him.
Al-Barsh, who was taking care of his physical fitness and swimming a lot, turned into a ghost, as Levy described in his article.
From Sde Liman detention center, he was then transferred to Ofer prison, where he answered the call of God on April 19. The writer pointed out that Israel ignored his death in prison, an act that reflects the characteristics of the occupying state.
According to the article, dozens of detainees died in Israeli prisons this year, similar to what happens in the world’s most notorious prisons.
But Al-Barash – in Levy’s opinion – has become a “ghost” doctor whose personality, life and death refuse to be forgotten. Sky News published his picture last week as part of an investigative report in which it revealed that his captors threw him into the courtyard of Ofer Prison while he was severely injured and naked from the waist down.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, even raised the possibility that he had been subjected to sexual assault before his death, given the report that he was found in a semi-nude position.
For her part, Israeli investigative journalist Ilana Dayan complained to the Christiane Amanpour program on the American CNN channel that Israeli channels do not adequately cover the human suffering in Gaza, and instead presents another report on the army’s “heroics.”
So who killed people, and how? Levy asks and replies, “We’ll never know.” But he added that the incident of killing humans taught him once again how “immoral and selective” Israel is in its concern for human life.
He concluded that a society in which at least some people feel terror and panic over the fate of the Israeli hostages, “and they care about them day and night, and protest noisily, and hang banners in the streets, is the same society that shows no concern for other human beings and determines their cruel fate.”
He concluded his article by saying that this “hypocrisy” cannot be defended, adding that the death of the borscht exposes Israel’s conscience, which is “crooked beyond repair.”