DUBAI: British Foreign Secretary David Cameron is calling for “answers from the Israelis” following a BBC report which found that Palestinian medical staff in Gaza were blindfolded, detained, stripped, and repeatedly beaten by Israeli soldiers following a raid on their hospital in February.
Israel Defense Forces raided the Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis on Feb. 15, one of the few facilities in the Gaza Strip that was still functioning at the time.
The BBC received footage secretly filmed in the hospital when the medics were detained on Feb. 16.
Three medical staff spoke to the BBC, saying they were detained for several days, during which they were humiliated, beaten, doused with cold water, and forced to kneel for hours.
The BBC conducted investigations into the incident over several weeks, interviewing a range of hospital staff and displaced individuals residing in the hospital’s courtyard, and corroborating details of the accounts.
Cameron told the UK’s House of Lords that the report was “very disturbing” and “we need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened and we need answers from the Israelis about that.”
Cameron’s deputy in the House of Commons, Andrew Mitchell, earlier in the day responded to several questions from MPs. He called for a “full explanation” in his answers and said that the “Foreign Office is pressing for full transparency and accountability” about the BBC report.
He asserted that Israel should comply with Article 18 of the Geneva Convention, which states that: “Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict.”
However, Sacha Deshmukh, UK’s chief of Amnesty International, said Mitchell’s response was inadequate.
He said: “We need major change from the UK over this terrible crisis, and this should include calling for an immediate ceasefire, exerting concerted pressure on Israel over allowing vastly scaled-up aid deliveries, while also demanding that Israel end its 17-year-long blockade of Gaza, which is an act of collective punishment.”
According to a humanitarian law expert, the footage and testimony of the medical staff interviewed by the BBC were “extremely concerning.” He said that some of the accounts provided to the BBC “very clearly cross over into the category of cruel and inhumane treatment.”
Dr. Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, co-director of the Centre for International Law at the University of Bristol, said: “It goes against what has for a long time been a very fundamental idea in the law that applies in armed conflict, which is that hospitals and medical staff are protected.”
