Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.
“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,” he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”
Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa says he was dragged from the operating room before being handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped.
