Video: Israeli occupation storms West Bank hospital, detains doctors

Troops seize medics and open fire inside hospital building

Occupation troops stormed the Turkish government hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas yesterday afternoon and detained several doctors and the hospital’s director after opening fire within the building. The soldiers were looking for a man wounded in an airstrike on a vehicle, but he had already been transferred to another hospital and Turkish hospital staff refused to let the soldiers take the bodies of two other victims.

Dr. Mahmoud Ghanam, who works in the hospital’s emergency department, said he and another doctor were briefly handcuffed and taken outside ‘in a humiliating way’ but then released:

The army entered in a brutal way, and they were shooting inside the emergency department. They handcuffed us and took me and my colleague.

Then they arrested me, tied me up, and took me in a humiliating way to the military vehicle outside.

Hospital director Muhammad Samara was tied up and beaten, but still refused to hand over the bodies of the two men. He told reporters that Israeli troops had smashed windows and then fired ‘randomly’ close to patients:

One of the soldiers also got into the elevator and fired bullets randomly, terrorising the patients.

After about forty-five minutes the troops withdrew, leaving damage to the interior and several people lightly injured.

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