Gazan paramedic tortured, threatened with rape in Israeli detention

By Ahmed Asmar​​​​​​​

ANKARA (AA) – A Palestinian paramedic was detained, blindfolded, and threatened with rape by Israeli soldiers as he was dispatched to rescue four injured people in Gaza City.

Walid Khalili, 36, took his ambulance to Tel al-Hawa neighborhood when he saw four men shot dead by soldiers at Barcelona Garden, 20 meters away from the Labor Ministry building.

“I saw the four men being executed in cold blood,” Khalili told New York-based group Human Rights Watch. “I saw it with my own eyes, I was three meters away. When they were shot.”

The paramedic fled to a nearby building to save his life.

“The Israeli forces raided the building and started yelling at me to raise my hands,” he recalled.

The father of three was kicked and beaten by the soldiers’ rifle butts, breaking his ribs. He was stripped naked and zip-tied, with Israeli soldiers repeatedly shoving his face into the sand with their boots and threatening to kill him.

An Israeli soldier doused him with gasoline, threatening to set him on fire, and others drove a military vehicle quickly toward him as if to run him over.

Khalili was then transferred to the notorious Sde Teiman Prison in Negev in southern Israel, where he was dragged on the ground, suspended from a chain hanging from the ceiling, and shocked with electricity.

“The world was spinning around, and I fainted. They hit me with batons. I kept fainting and hallucinating,” the paramedic recalled.

Khalili was grilled about Israeli hostages held by Hamas and pressured to confess he was a group member to stop torturing him.

- Rape

After 20 days, the paramedic was transferred to another detention facility called “al-Naqab” prison where he was cuffed, blindfolded, and threatened with rape.

Khalili said another detainee who was visibly “bleeding from his bottom” was brought to the prison and placed next to him.

This detainee told Khalili that before he was placed in detention, “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle].

“No one else knew, but he told me as a paramedic. He was terrified. His mental health was awful, he started talking to himself,” Khalili said.

After more than 34 days at the prison, the paramedic was released without charge at the Kerem Shalom crossing on the border between Gaza and Egypt. He had weighed 80 kilograms when arrested, and now weighed 60.

Khalili, whose youngest son was born in Gaza while he was in detention, is now sheltering in the Mawasi near the southern city of Khan Younis, separated from his family, who are in northern Gaza.

“I cry every day without my family,” he said. “I’m alone in the south, I have no one. I swear I don’t need anything but to be with my family.”

Last month, ten Israeli soldiers were detained for sexually assaulting a detainee from Gaza at Sde Teiman Prison, but five of them were later released.

Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights reports have recently indicated that prisoners from Gaza have been tortured at the notorious prison, which has led to the deaths of dozens of them.

The Israeli Supreme Court is considering a petition submitted by local human rights organizations to close the notorious prison, where Palestinian detainees have also suffered medical neglect.

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since an attack last October by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

More than 40,500 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and over 92,700 others injured, according to local health authorities.

Over ten months into the Israeli war, vast tracts of Gaza lie in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.

Israel faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which has ordered a halt to military operations in the southern city of Rafah, where over one million Palestinians had sought refuge before the area was invaded on May 6.