Haaretz newspaper said that the Israeli Prison Service does not believe it has to report the circumstances of the death of a Palestinian from Gaza in prison to the public because he was not a citizen of the country, noting that Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh, head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, recently found out that he died in a prison. Israeli citizen due to torture and beating during his interrogation.

The newspaper explained - in the column of writer Gideon Levy - that the last people who saw Adnan Al-Barash were doctors and detainees who were released, and they told Haaretz correspondents Jack Khoury and Bar Peleg that they barely recognized him. “It seemed clear that he had lived through hell, torture, humiliation, and sleep deprivation. He was not the person "What we know, it was his imagination."

The newspaper continued that the doctor, who worked in Britain and had a wife and 6 children, was beaten and tortured to death in an Israeli prison. This did not raise alarms in Israel, nor did his fellow doctors, nor the heads of medical institutions, nor those who participated in the horrific torture operations taking place at the Sde base. Timan and in Israeli prisons, they said nothing about a department director being beaten to death.

So what? -The writer wonders- After all, nearly 500 doctors and medical workers were killed in the war and their fate did not attract any attention, so why should the death of humans attract any attention? No war crime committed by Israel in Gaza has aroused any emotions here in Israel, except for the joy felt by the bloodthirsty right.

Heinous act

In addition to the death of the people came another heinous act: the retaliation of the authorities. The Shin Bet, the Israeli public security service, never speaks about those it interrogated and tortured. The Israeli army evaded responsibility, and the doctor was only “treated” in an army detention center. He was immediately transferred to the Shin Bet interrogation center in Kishon, and from there to Ofer prison, which is under the administration of The Israeli Prison Service responded very boldly: “The Service does not look into the circumstances of the death of detainees who are not Israeli citizens.”

A man dies in prison, but the Israeli Prison Service does not believe that it should report the circumstances of his death to the public because he was not a citizen of the state. In other words - as Gideon Levy says - the life of a non-citizen in Israeli prisons has no value, and therefore we must remember that when An Israeli is arrested in Cyprus on rape charges or in Peru on drug charges, and we are outraged by the conditions of his detention, and we must remember this even more poignantly when we complain to the world about the fate of our Israeli detainees.

The writer wondered how people could sympathize with the pain that the Israelis feel about the fate of their detainees, when it turns out that these same Israelis are cold-hearted and indifferent to the fate of their prisoners on the other side?

He concluded by asking the harsh question: Why is there not a single sign in what he called “Hostage Square” in Tel Aviv calling for an investigation into the killing of the Gaza doctor? Is his blood less red than the blood of the Israeli detainees who died? Why should the whole world care and work only for the sake of our detainees, and not for the sake of the Palestinian prisoners whose conditions of imprisonment and death in Israeli prisons should horrify everyone?

Source: Haaretz + Aljazeera