Report: Hamas using Gaza hospitals to detain and torture civilians

Hundreds of Gazans are being beaten and starved in Hamas effort to retain control, American Palestinian activist charges.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Hamas is using hospitals as detention centers and torture chambers to assert its control in Gaza, a Palestinian-American humanitarian activist charged Monday.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and the head of a group called Realign for Palestine, which calls out Hamas as “a terrorist organization that has stolen our future and held us hostage in our own land.”

In a post on X, he reported the torture described to him by a friend in Gaza who works with international NGOs as a humanitarian aid worker in a large displaced-persons camp in the Strip.

The man was crammed into “a metal cage, with 12 other people,” in the al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, “with no food, bathroom trips or access to light, except when they underwent rounds of interrogation and beatings.”

The only reason he was there, Alkhatib wrote, was because “one of Hamas’ intelligence agents/informants called in a tip about [him] ‘being in touch with suspicious external entities.’”

According to Alkhatib, “Hundreds of Gazans are being captured, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and threatened every single day at the hands of Hamas in hospitals.”

He pointed out that these medical centers “are all now sustained by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and a whole host of international NGOs and nonprofits,” and demanded that the US, UN, Arab League “and every nation involved in the cease-fire … put Hamas on notice and say, ‘Stop the use of medical facilities for terrorism.’”

In a Monday update on Hamas’ behavior in the aftermath of the U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement between the terrorist organization and Israel, neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) cited both Alkhatib’s source and the testimony of another anti-Hamas activist, Amin Abed.

Abed is a prominent Hamas foe who was hospitalized in critical condition 16 months ago after being beaten in Gaza by five armed men, and fled the Strip after recovering.

The FDD reported that Abed has “urged the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel to use its drones to collect evidence of Hamas’ brutal killing and torture of Palestinians,” relating to the Gaza-monitoring center stories of victims with “their limbs broken and metal plates inserted into their feet and hands.”

American officials confirmed two weeks ago that the US is using surveillance drones to observe activity on the ground in the Strip as part of its support of the CMCC’s mission to ensure compliance with the fragile accord.