More than two weeks after Israel announced his death, it still has not released the body of one of Gaza’s most celebrated doctors, Adnan al-Bursh. Israel hasn’t said how this 50-year-old man in good health died, even though he died in one of its darkest places, Ofer Prison, a place where very bad things are done at the hands of Israeli prison guards and Shin Bet interrogators. It hasn’t explained why al-Bursh was detained in December, then stripped, bound and carried away from the hospital where he was treating the sick and wounded. And it hasn’t offered any reason for why he was held for four months without any contact with his family or a lawyer.
Adnan al-Bursh was one of Gaza’s leading surgeons. More than that he was one of the Strip’s leading humanitarians, who had repeatedly sacrificed his own safety to provide life-saving medical treatment to people under bombardment. As the head of the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, al-Bursh helped pioneer the limb reconstruction unit, which opened after the 2014 Israeli military attacks on Gaza. But in December he’d gone at great personal risk to treat patients at Al-Awda Hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
By the time al-Bursh arrived at Al-Awda in early December, the hospital had already come under repeated attacks by the IDF. Less than a week after the Hamas attacks of October 7, the Israelis ordered the evacuation of all hospitals in northern Gaza, including Al-Awda, which has the largest maternity ward in the district. The World Health Organization warned any raid on Al-Awda would be a death sentence for the hospital’s sick and wounded.
On November 10, an Israeli airstrike hit an ambulance on route to the hospital. Ten days later, two doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières were killed in an Israeli airstrike at the Al-Adwa. On December 1, the hospital was again hit and damaged by Israeli bombs.
By December 12, the hospital was effectively under siege, surrounded by Israeli troops and tanks and under nearly constant gunfire from snipers. At least one pregnant woman had been shot at and one nurse had been shot through a hospital window and killed by an Israel sniper, while she tended patients on the fourth floor of the building. Supplies of fresh water had been cut off and people inside the hospital, including patients, were being nourished by only one meal of bread or rice each day.
It was into this slaughter zone that Adnan al-Bursh rushed to help the flood of wounded civilians being admitted to the understaffed hospital. Al-Bursh, one of Gaza’s most acclaimed surgeons, had received his medical training in Romania and later in England. In a sense, al-Bursh was coming home. He’d been born and raised in the Jalabia refugee camp on the northern end of the Gaza Strip and got his early education there.
Al-Bursh fully understood the kind of dire situation he was entering. In November, Al-Shifa Hospital came under Israeli attack and he was stranded inside along with his nephew, Abdallah al Bursh, for 10 days. When Israeli troops entered the hospital, they told Al-Bursh to move to the South. He refused and stayed to treat his patients until being forced out.
“After the Israeli forces besieged us at Al Shifa Hospital for 10 days and asked us to move to the south [of the Gaza Strip], they refused to allow food and drink to enter the hospital,” said Abdallah. “They forced us to relocate to the south, but Dr Adnan refused to comply and decided to take the risk by moving to the north to continue serving people at the Indonesian Hospital.”
Adnan’s wife and six children also refused to go south, instead they sought shelter at an UNRWA school in the northern section of the Gaza Strip. Al-Bursh had argued that Palestinians who fled south would never be able to return to their homes in the north.
Dr. al-Bursh resting after performing multiple surgeries in 2018.
For many Palestinians, al-Bursh is revered for his efforts during the Great March of Return in 2018-19, when he performed over 28 surgeries in one day on Palestinians injured by Israeli fire, after joining a non-violent march to the apartheid fence separating Israel from northern Gaza. Al-Bursh grew up during the First Intifada and recounted the suffering his family and neighbors endured from the violent Israeli response.
Al-Bursh wanted to pursue the cause of Palestinian rights by becoming a lawyer, but he said his family convinced him to pursue a medical education.
“Children always affect me the most,” al-Bursh said. “When I treat them, I feel like they could be my own children. When I see a child crying, it feels like it’s my own child that cries. Our children don’t have a normal childhood as I saw abroad, outside of Gaza.”
On November 20, the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia, where Dr. al-Bursh was now performing multiple surgeries a day, came under a fierce attack that lasted four days. al-Bursh was injured by Israeli fire while in the operating room. The hospital itself was badly damaged by Israeli tank fire. More than 500 patients and several thousand displaced people were inside the Indonesian hospital when it was struck. At least 12 people were killed in the initial attack, when Israeli tank and artillery fire hit the hospital’s post-operative care unit on the second floor late at night, where dozens of patients and refugees were sleeping.
“There was chaos, darkness and fire in the department, which made it very difficult to evacuate the dead and wounded,” a nurse named Mohamad, told the BBC. With good reason, Mohamad said he didn’t want his full name made public because he feared for his safety.
“On the fourth day, Israeli forces entered the hospital and inquired about my uncle, my father, Dr. Mirwan al Barsh, and other doctors,” Abdallah recalled. “Fortunately, the next day there was a truce, so they were not taken away.”
But the hospital had lost power and water, forcing the staff to evacuate 200 patients by bus to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The International Red Cross arranged the evacuation of 400 other patients. The displaced people were largely left to fend for themselves.
The siege was harshly condemned by the Indonesian government which had financed the construction of the hospital, which opened in 2016. By December the Indonesia Hospital had been turned into an IDF military base and Adnan al-Bursh was applying his healing arts in Al-Adwa Hospital a few miles away.
“Health workers and civilians should never have to be exposed to such horror, especially while inside a hospital,” wrote WHO head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Before the war, Gaza had 36 hospitals. Eight months later only 11 are even partially functional. Two of the largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and Nasser, have not only been effectively destroyed, but they have also been revealed to be the sites of mass graves of more than 500 Palestinians killed by Israelis, including many health care workers. “Some of the deceased were allegedly elderly, women and wounded individuals—with some found with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes,” said Bob Kitchen the International Rescue Committee’s vice president of emergencies.
The hospitals that remain are short of medical supplies, medicine, water and power. “These health care facilities are not built for mass casualty. And in fact, no hospital in the world is built for this kind of sustained severity of mass casualty, nor could any be able to sustain it,” said Dr. Seema Jilani, a surgeon with IRC’s emergency medical team who worked at Al Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza. There have been more than 400 Israeli attacks on Gazan healthcare facilities, ambulances and workers since October 7, 2023.
As it faces airstrikes and a military invasion, there are only three functioning hospitals left in Rafah, but one of these, Al-Najjar Hospital, “which provides dialysis services for more than 100 patients,” is located in the area that Israel has ordered residents to evacuate, so, according to the WHO, “patients are afraid to seek services.”
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with
Alexander Cockburn)
