Gaza: during the genocide, torture continues

The death of Doctor Adnan Al-Bursh under torture appears to have recently been confirmed. This famous surgeon from Gaza was arrested in December 2023 by the Israeli army at Al-Awda hospital, where, like so many others, he sought treatment. According to available sources, the doctor was raped to death by his Israeli captors (« likely raped to death »according to Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur). The testimony of a detainee who saw his lower body exposed before his death appears to confirm a practice whose legitimacy is openly debated in Israel. The United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, also reported violence suffered by its employees, while our governments decided to defund its activities, vital since 1949.

Doctor Adnan Al-Bursh would thus have suffered, for many months, the violence of a State, and its agents, which the governments of the Western world continue to support. But let's look at the facts. Let's look at the state in which Muazzaz Abayat, a Palestinian from Bethlehem, left Israeli jails: his eyes destroyed, his body radically broken. The image of this man, still alive, lets us imagine what he may have suffered. “I have prison inside me” he says to those who come to meet him in the place of care where he was received before being, apparently, arrested again. Thus, the torture of Palestinian detainees continues during the Gaza genocide. And the discourse of civilization confronting barbarism is exhausted.

If the military operations in Gaza do not make these governments bend; if, before public opinion, these operations can still be presented as justified by the need to eradicate Hamas, WHO will justify the torture of those who find themselves, helpless, in the custody of their executioners? Those whose individual condition we can observe. WHO will dare to say that it is militarily necessary to break them and inflict this suffering on them for many months? And then, if these facts are faced, the collective reality of Gaza will perhaps emerge.

Because, as Doctors Without Borders has again noted in recent days, the Palestinians – that is to say also the children of Palestine – have, in Gaza, the choice between “be killed while trying to escape or die under siege at home”. The genocide in Gaza, recently attested by a Special UN Committee, takes particular forms that must be understood and not minimized. These forms are first of all the siege, that is to say the confinement in the space of Gaza, whose land, air and maritime borders are entirely controlled by Israel. It is this confinement which makes it possible to deprive vital goods and thus bring about the slow death that the Genocide Convention aims for.

A slow death claimed from October 9, 2023 by the Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for the ” animals ” that Israel is fighting: “intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence intended to bring about its total or partial physical destruction” of Article II (c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Slow death is also inflicted by the destruction of homes and orders to move to places, within the enclosed space of Gaza, which everyone now knows is they are not sure. We must therefore survive, in anxiety about the next strike, in makeshift tents, surrounded by waste and poverty. Slow death is also the lack of care since hospitals are devastated by Israeli bombings. This gradual destruction comes on top of the brutal death from the same massive, unprecedented bombings that killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and probably left more than 10,000 of them in rubble.

The genocide in Gaza takes distant, technological forms, forms of military border control and evacuation orders falling from the sky. It also takes concrete forms that are carried out by Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza: the bulldozer drivers who, it seems, flatten the tents of refugees near hospitals, the summary executions apparently carried out in some of these hospitals, which would have been followed, as the UN reports, by the burying of bodies in mass graves that were finally discovered. The concrete form also, in Israel, of the humiliation and then the torture inflicted on those who were arrested. This genocide reveals a negation of the humanity of others which is expressed in the restitution of unidentified remains to Gaza, and in the practice of torture to the point of death. So, let us truly remember Maurice Audin!