A Palestinian man who was detained by the Israeli military for three days near Al-Shifa Hospital, in northern Gaza, during the IDF’s operation there, says he was forced into torture positions, spat on and threatened with execution.
Mohammad Mershid, 25, spoke to CNN while being treated for a head injury at another hospital, Al-Asqa Martyrs Hospital, in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. He said Israeli troops stormed a house where he was sheltering, near Al-Shifa. They separated men, women and children, and stripped detainees naked inside rooms covered with broken glass, he said.
“They didn’t even interrogate us, they were just enjoying torturing us,” he told CNN on Sunday. “We didn’t know what was happening with our neighbors. We were all besieged and we heard screaming.
They forced us to bend on our knees, and kept our hands on our backs… We all got stitches,” added Mershid. “One of the officers in the military… he kept spitting on me and pulled my hair from my chest.”
Israeli forces threatened him with execution, he says, before he was released and told to flee south along Al-Rasheed Street. Mershid escaped by scrambling over dead bodies that Israeli tanks had crushed “to the ground.” He added: “They shot everything alive, really everything. A lot of cats and dogs, even birds on the street.”
What the IDF says: CNN has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) about the allegations levied by Mershid. The IDF has so far not responded. The IDF previously said it detained 500 people it claims are “terrorists” during its ongoing operation at Al-Shifa Hospital, but did not provide any details of or offer any evidence about the detainees. CNN cannot independently verify the numbers.
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