LONDON: Lawyers have filed a lawsuit in the High Court in London against the torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in the Gaza Strip.

The lawyers are seeking, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, to obtain an order preventing the British government from continuing to grant licenses to export arms to British companies that sell weapons to Israel.

The lawsuit consists of more than 100 pages obtained by the lawyers from Palestinian and Western doctors working in hospitals in Gaza, as well as ambulance drivers and civil defense and relief workers.

The lawsuit was filed by lawyers from non-governmental organizations including Al-Haq, the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch.

It is noteworthy that this lawsuit is the first attempt to put the crimes of the occupation before a British judge.

According to one of the testimonies on which the lawsuit was based, Dr. Ben Thompson, a Canadian specialist, said he treated a 60-year-old man who ha
d been stripped naked by the occupation forces, had his wrists tightly bound for three days, and was dragged across the ground.

He added, “Every part of the health care system has been targeted and destroyed, and it is now completely incapable of providing care, and many people are dying from problems that are completely treatable.’

The Canadian doctor noted that when he visited the tent city in Rafah in March, water was rationed to three litres per day, there was one toilet for every 800 people, and that on one occasion, the hospital was so overcrowded that one of the patients he was caring for died on the floor.

Dr Khalid Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College London Hospital, said several of his patients were killed due to the ongoing targeting of sniper fire.

He said he had met several patients who had clearly been beaten in detention camps, and one patient who had been dragged across the floor with an external fixator holding his broken limb.

He added that on his second visit he had treat
ed a disabled man who had been ‘detained, handcuffed, blindfolded and wheelchair-bound with his wrists tied to the right side of his torso for 30 days’.

Source: Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA