Rights and Accountability 28 February 2025
Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli detention on 27 February were embraced by their family members at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 27 February livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Early Thursday morning, after a five-day delay by the Israeli government, more than 600 Palestinian men, women and children were released from Israeli detention back to their loved ones in Gaza and the occupied West Bank or exiled to neighboring countries.
Reporting from Gaza on the scene at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, where the released Palestinian hostages underwent medical checks, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said that many Palestinians were returned with severe injuries and in dire health.Many of them, Abu Azzoum added, “confirmed that they have witnessed some of the worst methods of torture at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces.”
In Gaza, seven infants died this week from hypothermia as winter temperatures dropped and as Israel has continued to restrict or delay the entry of necessary caravans, tents and heavy machinery to clear rubble as agreed upon under the 19 January ceasefire terms.
The United Nations office for human rights in Palestine said on 26 February that three of the babies were newborns between one and two days old.A Palestinian health official speaking to Reuters said that in the past two weeks, eight newborns were admitted to hospitals with severe cold-related injuries.
One infant, a 2-month-old girl, died of hypothermia on 25 February in her family’s tent in al-Mawasi Khan Younis, and her body was received at the nearby Nasser Medical Complex.
The infant’s father, Yusuf al-Shinbat, told reporters, “I unbuttoned her clothes and patted her, but there was no breath or heartbeat. Yesterday, I was playing with her, bathing her … I was happy with her. She was a [beautiful] child, like the moon.”
Our contributor Abubaker Abed filmed himself walking through the rubble in Khan Younis on Tuesday. He describes the destruction and how people are surviving in the freezing cold temperatures.
The Gaza City municipality reported this week that a major campaign was underway to collect and remove solid waste from the streets and neighborhoods around the city.The municipality said, “Gaza City is experiencing a major health and environmental disaster due to the accumulation of approximately 170,000 tons of waste in the streets.” The municipality added that about 80 percent of its heavy machinery was destroyed by the Israeli army.
New report on torture of health workers
A new report on Israel’s systematic policies of abduction, torture and killing of medical professionals in Gaza was released this week by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
It includes detailed testimonies that the organization has gathered from 24 medical professionals who were detained, abused and tortured. The testimonies highlight Israel’s systematic policies of inhumane treatment of Palestinians, and the countless violations of international human rights law.
PHRI says that 23 of the 24 health workers its staff interviewed were taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp.From the moment of their arrest in Gaza, PHRI says, “medical workers, through transportation and later in Israeli detention facilities, detainees endure physical, psychological and sexual abuse, as well as starvation and medical neglect amounting to torture.”
The organization says that “the accounts gathered in this report reveal a grim reality of relentless, severe, and cruel mistreatment, including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.”
Medical workers who are still “incarcerated under these conditions and can still be saved if enough pressure is put on the Israeli government to release them. They are detained because they are Palestinians, because they are from Gaza, but also and importantly because they are healthcare workers,” PHRI said.
Expanding assault, land theft in West Bank
Turning to the occupied West Bank, my colleague Tamara Nassar reports, “Israel is implementing in the occupied West Bank what it has done in historic Palestine since the state’s inception: forcibly removing Palestinians from their homes and barring them from returning.”
The Israeli army has deployed tanks inside the Jenin area for the first time in approximately two decades.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian shepherds southeast of Bethlehem on 26 February, according to the Wafa news agency.The head of the local village council said that a group of settlers invaded the lands, forced the shepherds out, and set up two tents nearby along with grazing cattle as a way to establish a colonial outpost.
Israeli forces expanded their ongoing attack on Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron this week. On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers demolished nearly 20 tents full of people’s belongings and destroyed the water and electricity networks in the Khallet al-Dabe community.
Mohammed Badawi, one of the affected residents, told Wafa that the occupation forces demolished the tents that housed more than 10 families, who took refuge in those tents after the occupation had demolished their homes earlier this month, leaving more than 80 individuals, most of them women and children, homeless.
Israeli forces had demolished more than 17 homes and a number of caves in that area over the last month, seven of them in Khallet al-Dabe alone.
This video is from 10 February, as Israeli forces bulldozed people’s homes in the village:
Wafa reported that Israeli occupation authorities also razed land and uprooted olive trees in the town of Beit Iksa, northwest of Jerusalem.Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to share images of people expressing determination and resilience in the aftermath of Israel’s 15-month genocide.
Schools across Gaza reopened this week, many for the first time since October 2023.
Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif reported from al-Nasr school in Gaza City as well, where he says 300 children came to restart their education. He says the school was bombed several times during the genocide and the Israeli army committed massacres inside the school but the students wanted to return to education again.Despite the tragic circumstances, he says, this was the first day of school inside the Gaza Strip.
And a pharmacist and writer, Omar Hamad, and his friend filmed themselves in a field in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, where spring flowers and plants have started to grow and bloom.
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