'No rules' Doctors tell of being humiliated, beaten and tortured in IDF jails

Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.

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"I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre," he says. "One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: 'Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?' I said: 'Yes, that's me.' And then the beating began."

The 63-year-old says he was dragged from the operating room in his surgeons' scrubs before being handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped. Abu Ajwa was then put in a military truck with other doctors, nurses and medical staff and driven away. Less than 24 hours later he was in a detention facility in Israel, beginning what he describes as months of violence and abuse.

"There were no rules," he says. "There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] ... [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me: 'Today we are going to brush your teeth.' I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing." Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth.

Under international law, healthcare workers like Abu Ajwa should be protected from attacks by warring parties and be allowed to continue providing medical care to all who need it. Yet by the time the January ceasefire came into effect, more than 1,000 medical staff across Gaza had been killed and many hospitals bombed to rubbleattacks which a UN Human Rights Council commission concluded amounted to war crimes.