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The Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis

Photo: AFP

Palestinian medical personnel from the Gaza Strip are making serious allegations against the Israeli military, according to a media report.

Staff at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis spoke to the BBC about alleged assaults.

Employees are said to have been held by the Israeli military, forced to take off their clothes and repeatedly beaten.

The British broadcaster said it was able to examine many, but not all, of the allegations.

The report is based, among other things, on video and photo recordings.

The Israeli military carried out a raid on Nasser Hospital on February 15 because, according to their own statements, intelligence information indicated that the hospital was harboring Hamas fighters.

Israeli hostages who were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th were also said to have been held there.

Secretly filmed footage from the hospital on February 16 was made available to the BBC following the raid.

According to the report, medical staff were detained that day.

The footage shows a row of men, stripped to their underwear, kneeling outside the hospital's emergency room building with their hands behind their heads.

Medical coats lie in front of some of them.

Members of the medical staff said they were beaten and then taken away without clothes, according to the BBC.

Alleged beatings and insults

A doctor at the hospital told the station that he had been held for a week and that his hand had been broken.

According to the BBC, his reports coincide with those of two other hospital employees.

Another hospital employee reported, according to the BBC, that the medics were transported in military vehicles wearing only their underpants, blindfolded and holding their hands "stacked on top of each other."

They were beaten, insulted and had cold water poured over them.

The Israeli military denies this.

An official told the BBC: "There were no handcuffs, we did not take them for questioning, not even for further arrest, but to question them and try to get information about the hostages or the Hamas commanders , who were in the hospital... a very simple questioning and that's it."

Israel's military denies mistreating prisoners

A humanitarian law expert described the video footage and statements from medical staff interviewed by the BBC as "extremely worrying".

Some of the reports "clearly fell into the category of cruel and inhumane treatment."

Dr.

Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, co-director of the Center for International Law at the University of Bristol, told the BBC: "It goes against what has long been a very fundamental idea of ​​the law in armed conflict, namely that hospitals and medical staff are protected. «

Several doctors also said that 13 patients died in the days following Israel's raid.

Many of these patients died because of the conditions in the hospital - the lack of electricity, water and other essential things needed to run Nasser.

The BBC could not independently verify this.

The BBC has presented all the allegations to the Israeli military.

The military denied that medical personnel were injured during their deployment.

It stated that any mistreatment of prisoners violated the orders of the Israel Defense Forces and was therefore strictly prohibited.

The hospital was also “supplied with hundreds of food rations and an alternative generator, which made it possible to continue operations and treat patients.”

The hospital's "essential systems" functioned via an uninterruptible power system during the operation, it said.

The Islamist terrorist organization Hamas killed around 1,140 people and kidnapped around 250 people as hostages in the Gaza Strip in its brutal major attack on several locations in southern Israel on October 7th.

Since then, Israel has taken massive military action in the Gaza Strip, with the declared aim of destroying Hamas.

According to the UN, more than 30,000 people were killed on the Palestinian side.

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