Health minister defends medical care for October 7 terrorists as intelligence asset
Uriel Buso says injured attackers treated in Israel have provided valuable information that helped rescue hostages from Gaza
Health Minister Uriel Buso on Monday defended the provision of medical care to captured Gazan terrorists, saying that some have assisted Israel Defense Forces troops on the ground during missions to bring back hostages.
At a health conference, Buso talked about how Israel dealt with wounded terrorists it captured during the initial Hamas onslaught, when the terror group led thousands of terrorists in a massive cross-border attack from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Terrorists also abducted 251 people as hostages to Gaza.
Buso explained that although the IDF set up a special facility to treat wounded terrorists it captured from the October 7 attack, some were brought to Israeli hospitals for specialized treatment.
He said that there is a legal obligation to treat everyone, but in addition, there is also a benefit to treating terrorists as they can then be interrogated for information.
“At the end of the day, the system has to treat everyone who comes under its auspices. A doctor who has been in the health system for 30 years explained to me that terrorists whose condition had stabilized were brought in for questioning, and [with that information] we knew how to save lives,” Buso told the Yedioth Ahronoth Health Conference.
“Some of those terrorists treated in the system entered with [troops] into Gaza, into tunnels,” in the search for hostages, he said. He added, “We take them for treatment in order to stabilize them, not to give them a massage.”
The information gleaned is saving the lives of “hundreds, and thousands of soldiers” in Gaza, Buso asserted, a principle he claimed applies in all situations when dealing with terrorists.
“How can you know if he a member of a cell, was he on his way to do something else, if there is a ticking bomb,” Buso said. “The hospital stabilizes him” so that he can be questioned. “It really saves lives.”
Earlier in the year, the Shin Bet published an image of an operation to recover the bodies of five slain hostages from the Gaza Strip, showing a detained Palestinian aiding members of the security agency to locate the tunnel where the remains were held.
At the conference, Buso revealed the health system had been preparing for the possibility of a large-scale attack in the south. A few months before October 7, the Soroka Medical Center examined a scenario of receiving 300 casualties a day.
“In fact, they had 1,000 in 24 hours,” Buso said of October 7.
Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
