Renowned Surgeon and Lead Author of New Lancet Study Tortured by Israeli Military

PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 2 Sep 2024

Ryan Grim | Drop Site - TRANSCEND Media Service

Dr. Khaled Alser was held for at least three months at notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and remains “forcibly disappeared,” according to colleagues.

31 Aug 2024 – Dr. Khaled Alser, a highly respected Palestinian surgeon, is the lead author of The Lancet’s first medical paper to detail cases of trauma among Gazan patients and medical professionals. But he has had little opportunity to mark the occasion: On March 25, the Israel Defense Forces abducted him during a raid on his hospital and he remains in captivity, his whereabouts unconfirmed. Since his abduction, he has been held at Ofer Detention Center. He has also spent at least three months at Sde Teiman, a notorious IDF-run torture camp in the Negev Desert. A Physicians for Human Rights Israel report provided to his colleagues recently includes testimony detailing Dr. Alser’s torture and abuse at the camp, though Alser has been accused of no wrongdoing.

A PHR attorney was able to interview Alser at the Ofer prison in late July, where the organization believes he is still being held. PHR provided the testimony to his colleagues, who shared it with Drop Site News. (The testimony is included below.) An IDF spokesperson was unable to provide details as to his status by publication time.

Soldiers at Sde Teiman have been charged with rape, an allegation backed up by video evidence. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch both recently published damning reports that found systemic torture and sexual abuse at Sde Teiman as well as at Israeli’s detention facilities generally. The HRW report focused on the torture of abducted medical staff.

Dr. Alser is a widely respected doctor, whose case was previously covered on our show Counter Points as well as in The Intercept. His paper, published Friday in The Lancet, is titled, “Trauma care supported through a global telemedicine initiative during the 2023–24 military assault on the Gaza Strip, occupied Palestinian territory: a case series.” Its abstract lays out the paper’s method:

We present a patient case series of traumatic injuries shared in an international telemedicine group by the surgical team at Nasser Medical Complex, also known as Nasser Hospital, the largest remaining partially functioning hospital in Gaza. WhatsApp (Meta; Menlo Park, CA, USA), a widely available and user-friendly end-to-end encrypted smartphone application, was used to facilitate consultations for weapon-inflicted injuries. All the presented patient cases were shared after obtaining verbal consent from the patients and discussed through a multidisciplinary team approach. The group was developed into a community with more than 15 specialty and injury-oriented subgroups and over 1000 members who joined through non-targeted social media outreach followed by snowball recruitment. Prospective registration and formal ethics approval in Gaza was impossible because the Ministry of Health, including the local Helsinki Committee, had suspended all operations. In June, 2024, we obtained ethics approval from the local Helsinki committee in Gaza.

One of the cases in the study is that of an operating room nurse who was shot through the chest by an Israeli sniper while he was in the hospital. He was later abducted and tortured by the Israeli military, according to the report.

Dr. Simon Fitzgerald, a Brooklyn-based co-author of the report, said on a press call Saturday that Dr. Alser had been “forcibly disappeared” and that the work of the paper’s authors would not be considered complete until Alser was freed and Nasser hospital was rebuilt and fully reopened.

Dr. Osaid Alser, a Harvard-trained surgeon and cousin of Dr. Alser, said that the hospital has since been partially reopened, with roughly 200 beds operational. The two cousins helped launch the WhatsApp group that became the focal point of the Lancet paper on telemedicine.

A PHRI lawyer gathered the following testimony from Dr. Alser at Ofer Detention Center on July 23, four months after he’d been detained:

Go to Original – dropsitenews.com

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