CONTENT WARNING: this article includes accounts of torture and sexual violence that readers may find distressing
Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was among the best-trained medical professionals in occupied Gaza. He was well-known and well-loved. But Israel’s occupation forces (IOF) detained him, without charging him for any crimes. And within months, they had tortured him to death.
A new Sky News report has shared accounts revealing details of his brutal murder. But the BBC (along with other mainstream media outlets) seems to think they are not worth sharing.
Israel’s murder of Adnan Al-Bursh
As Israel was destroying Gaza in December 2023, Adnan Al-Bursh was working in Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza. As fellow doctor Mohammad Obeid recounted to Sky News, the hospital’s director informed “all males aged between 14 and 65” that they would have to leave. The IOF had “told him that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it”. They duly left the building.
Without any charges, the IOF abducted him. They took him to the notorious Sde Teiman military base in Israel, where video footage of IOF soldiers gang-raping a prisoner caused uproar in August 2024. A fellow inmate at Sde Teiman, Dr Khalid Hamouda, told Sky News that “at least a quarter” of the people in the torture camp at the time were probably medical professionals. The IOF had already beaten Al-Bursh badly by the time he arrived, Hamouda said. “He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”
The IOF claims to have passed “responsibility” for Adnan Al-Bursh over to the Israeli Prison Service just a week later. His captors would take him to Ofer Prison near Jerusalem in April. And that’s where he died.
In a deposition, a fellow prisoner explained:
In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body…
The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up.
Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s healthcare system, and systematically tortured prisoners
In October, the BBC reported on a UN ‘commission of inquiry’ that had criticised Israel for its “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system”. The IOF had “deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel”, according to the report. And it was children who had “borne the brunt” of this callous campaign. Human Rights Watch has also documented the arbitrary detention of healthcare workers from Gaza, having interviewed eight professionals whom the IOF had abducted without charge. Allegations of mistreatment in captivity include “rape and sexual abuse“.
In August, meanwhile, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem had released a report documenting systematic “sexual abuse, starvation and assault” at prisons across Israel. It had interviewed 55 Palestinian prisoners whom Israel had held since 7 October. B’Tselem spokesperson Shai Parnes explained:
As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.
Almost all of those B’Tselem interviewed were released without charges.
The report reveals:
a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.
And it seems that Adnan Al-Bursh was one of the people who lost his life as a result of this systematic torture machine.
After 7 October 2023, Israeli propaganda highlighted allegations of sexual violence on that day. But as numerous sources have highlighted since, there is little to no evidence of such violence, any such actions were unlikely to have been ‘part of the plan’, and we can’t justify calling any such actions ‘widespread’ or ‘systematic’.
Where is the BBC‘s report?
Sky News has faced criticism recently for its pro-Israel editorial decisions, along with other corporate media outlets. There is clearly a lot of pressure on journalists to minimise, underplay, or ignore the brutality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, it often seems like mainstream outlets are competing among themselves to be the least worst. And with its important report about Adnan Al-Bursh, Sky News showed that it probably isn’t the worst right now.
The BBC, meanwhile, often shows its priorities via omission. Because it shared the initial news in May about Al-Bursh’s death in captivity. But at the time of writing, it seems to have remained silent on the Sky News revelations about the details of his murder. And this simply adds more evidence to allegations of clear pro-Israel bias in its coverage.
UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese called Western media outlets failing to report on this ‘racist’. She said:
The racism of Western media who are not covering this, and Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening.
