The then Head of Ethics of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), Eran Dolev, gave an interview on Nov 25, 1999, to a four-member delegation from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, London, UK, headed by the director, Helen Bamber. During the interview, Dolev stated that “a couple of broken fingers” during the interrogation of Palestinian men was a price worth paying for information. Imagine if the Head of Ethics of the British Medical Association (BMA) had said this in relation to police or army interrogations in Northern Ireland.
Dolev's admission crystallised a position that campaigners had inferred from the IMA's silence over many years on the use of torture in Israel.1 In 1996, Amnesty International concluded that Israeli doctors working with the security services “form part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill-treated and humiliated in ways that place prison medical practice in conflict with medical ethics”.2 Amnesty also pointed to Israeli government statements that detainees were “under constant medical supervision”.2 The IMA took no action, though they have elsewhere stated that they would investigate if irregular behaviour by an individual doctor was reported to them. This stance is disingenuous: the problem is not isolated malpractice (and who would report this anyway, since the word of Palestinian detainees is discounted by the IMA who have never responded to local testimonies), but institutionalised practice—as Amnesty has made clear. The IMA have long been impervious to discreet appeals made to them from organisations such as Physicians for Human Rights (USA) and Amnesty.
