In December, al-Bursh was arrested by the military in the last hospital he worked at, Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalya. He was told to come outside and abducted. Over the next few months, he apparently underwent horrific torture at a Shin Bet interrogation facility and, later, the Sde Teiman detention camp. He was then transferred to Ofer Prison, where he died on April 19. "We could hardly recognize him," said a Palestinian doctor who saw him at the detention facility. "It was obvious that he'd been through hell. It wasn't the man we knew, but a shadow of that man." Al-Bursh, who stayed fit and often swam, turned into a ghost. He was a specialist in surgical orthopedics who studied in Jordan and Britain; had he lived somewhere else, things could have been much different.
His death in prison was met with a characteristic shrug in Israel, although actor and rapper Tamer Nafar wrote a lovely elegy for him in Haaretz; in which I also wrote about al-Bursh. The authorities avoided taking any responsibility for his death. The prison service, controlled by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, said it doesn't deal with "illegal combatants." So this is suddenly about "combatants," with whom they suddenly "don't deal." The military said it had not been holding al-Bursh when he died.
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Dozens of detainees have died in Israeli prisons this year, like in the worst prisons in the world – and this isn't a subject worth discussing by the protest movement for democracy in Israel. Hundreds of medical personnel have been killed in Gaza, and it doesn't even interest the Israeli Medical Association. What a disgrace.
But al-Bursh has become a phantom doctor, whose character, life and death refuse to disappear. Last week, his image came up in an investigative report by John Sparks on Sky News. While Israeli investigative journalist Ilana Dayan complains to Christiane Amanpour on CNN that "we are not sufficiently covering the human suffering in Gaza" and then presents another heroic report on the military, the TV station she works for shows not even a glimpse of what's happening in Gaza. "Viewers aren't interested," said one of the heads of Israel's Second Authority for Television and Radio this week. The statement summarized the new concept of journalism: pay-per-view.
Palestinians walk through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, April.Credit: Mohammed Hajjar, AP
But in a world where other media sources exist, Dr. al-Bursh has not been forgotten. The Sky News investigative report revealed that he was thrown into the courtyard at Ofer Prison while severely wounded, nude from the waist down. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, raised the possibility that he had undergone sexual abuse before his death, given the report that he was found half-naked.
Who killed al-Bursh, and how? We'll never know. However, we've learned yet again how immoral Israel's selective concern for human life is. A society in which at least some people are horrified and rattled by the fate of Israel's hostages – are concerned for them day and night, vociferously protesting and hanging banners in the streets – is the same society that shows no concern about other human beings and determines their cruel fate. This hypocrisy cannot be defended. There is no way to bridge Israelis' deep shock over the death of hostages in Hamas captivity and their total indifference to the death of al-Bursh, a hostage in Israeli captivity. There is no way of resolving these contradictions, other than to conclude that Israel's conscience has been irretrievably twisted.