The Electronic Intifada Podcast 20 March 2025
The human rights group notes that the atrocities occurring in these Israeli prisons “are among the worst violations recorded by human rights organizations worldwide.”
Meanwhile, a new United Nations report concludes that Israel has carried out “genocidal acts” against Palestinians by systematically destroying women’s healthcare facilities during the war in Gaza, and that Israeli soldiers have used sexual violence as a war strategy.
“Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention,” stated the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The commission asserted that those actions, in addition to a surge in maternity deaths due to restricted access to medical supplies, amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination.
Dr. Sarah Lalonde, a Canada-based emergency and family physician, recently returned from working in Gaza at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis. Along with local physicians, she treated some of the released Palestinian prisoners who were tortured in Israeli detention.
“We saw broken bones that were broken at different moments and did not have the appropriate care to be able to heal in the right way,” she told The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
“We saw people who had conditions that had happened during prison, like, for example, a stroke, and then they had a loss of mobility on one side of their body and it was not treated. We saw people who had not gotten their medication that they needed. We saw people who had skull fractures that had healed but had not received medical attention.”
Lalonde explained that there were several prisoner cases that stuck with her.
“We met a gentleman who told us that he’d been kicked in the abdomen recently, in the last 48 hours. We were talking to him, and we were doing an ultrasound. And while he was there, he was telling us that the Israeli prison officers had wrapped his penis in a metal wire, [which] prevented him from being able to pee for five days. And then after that, he became incontinent. He also mentioned some sexual torture, but he wasn’t comfortable to go into the details at that time,” she said.
Another patient, she added, had a gastrointestinal disorder that he had received treatment for before he was taken to prison. When he was in Israeli detention, he asked for medication but it was not provided to him, Lalonde said.
“He told us that when he was sick, the doctor would take him into a room, and the doctor had two things. The doctor had gas – he didn’t tell us how the gas was used by the doctor – and also had a stick, and the doctor would beat him and tell him that he can’t say he was sick. And then on his last day at the prison, which was the day that we met him, he was taken into a room, and some kind of Israeli intelligence officers spoke with him, and they said that actually they had a bomb prepared for him, and they loved him so much that the bomb was not only for him, but for his entire family, and that that was their plan for him when he returned to Gaza – to bomb his family and kill them all.”
Lalonde also talks about patients she treated who had been shot by Israeli snipers and assessed the lack of basic medical equipment inside Gaza hospitals because of Israel’s blockade and the recent closing of all crossings.
“We need to advocate for our patients to say, how did they end up in this situation? Yes, we’re going to help the eight-year-old boy who was shot by a sniper, but what’s the underlying reason that that child was shot by a sniper, and how can we help with the bigger system of injustice that led to that one event?”
Produced by Tamara Nassar
Photo: Omar Ashtawy / APA images
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