Prominent Israeli writer Gideon Levy has criticised Israel's immoral treatment of Palestinians, following the horrific torture that Dr. Adnan al-Barsh was subjected to, leading to his death in an Israeli 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 a charming and influential personality who used social media to document his work in “unfathomable” conditions, with no electricity, no medicine, no anesthesia, and often no beds.

In one of the videos, he was seen holding a shovel in his hand and digging a mass grave in the hospital yard for deceased patients after the refrigerators were filled with bodies. Levy said that Al-Barsh became a local hero during his lifetime, and an international hero after his death.

His widow, Yasmine, is quoted as saying that he could barely return home after the war broke out; he and his medical team were forced to flee three hospitals destroyed by the Israeli army “in strict compliance with international law,” a comment that is painfully ironic and mocks an army that prides itself on respecting that law.

Levy, a leftist writer hated by the occupation state, recounted details of the Israeli army’s arrest of Al-Barsh last December from Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, the last medical facility where he worked, when they summoned him outside the hospital and kidnapped him.

He explained that he was subjected to "horrific" torture during the few months he spent in an interrogation center of the General Security Service (Shabak), and later in the Sde Teiman detention camp, so much so that a Palestinian doctor who saw him in the detention center said he barely recognized him.

The man who used to take care of his physical fitness and practice swimming a lot has turned into a ghost, as Levy described in his article.

From Sde Liman prison, he was then transferred to Ofer prison, where he answered his Lord’s call on April 19. The writer noted that Israel ignored his death in prison, in an act that reflects the characteristics of the occupying state.

According to the article, dozens of detainees have died in Israeli prisons this year, similar to what happens in the world's most notorious prisons.

But Al-Barsh - 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 wounded 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 sexually assaulted before his death, given the report that he was found semi-naked.

For her part, Israeli investigative journalist Ilana Dayan complained to Christiane Amanpour's program on the American CNN channel that Israeli channels do not adequately cover the human suffering in Gaza, and instead present another report about the "heroism" of the army.

So who killed Barash, and how? Levy asks, and answers: “We will never know.” But he adds that the Barash killing 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 horror and panic over the fate of the Israeli hostages, “and care about them day and night, 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" could not be defended, adding that Barash's death exposed Israel's "irreparably twisted" conscience.