On April 2 we met Tamer. His Facebook posts show a proud young man and father who became a nurse to provide for his two small children — no small feat in a land with
one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel
raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg.
Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right).
Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.
(The IDF did not address specific questions about Tamer’s case, but instead emailed a press release responding to another outlet’s report of
detainee abuse and torture at Sde Teiman. In it,
the IDF denied mistreating detainees.)
When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive.