JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israeli security agents have been pressuring Gazans seeking medical treatment abroad to work as informers in violation of international law, an Israeli rights group said Monday. A report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said that Palestinian patients have "become an accessible and important target for the GSS (General Security Services) for the purposes of recruiting and gathering information." Efforts to recruit informers have intensified since the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in June 2007 and have increasingly focused on patients, who are some of the only Gazans still crossing into Israel, the report said. The group suggests such tactics violate international law, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention which explicitly prohibits coercing civilians into providing intelligence information. The report includes 11 of some 30 sworn testimonies taken in recent months which describe security agents interrogating patients and appearing to make their passage from Gaza into Israel conditional on their working as informers. The patients describe being led to underground rooms at the Erez pedestrian crossing, where they are questioned for hours about neighbours and relatives. "You have cancer, and it will soon spread to your brain, as long as you don't help us," security agents told one man, according to testimony provided to Physicians for Human Rights and AFP on condition of anonymity. After around eight hours of interrogation he was given permission to enter but by then had missed his appointment at an Israeli hospital. He had to reschedule and was not allowed to leave until two months later. Another man, a farmer who had been wounded by a tank shell in 2006 and given emergency treatment in Israel, was asked similar questions in January when he received a permit to return to the hospital for a follow-up operation. "They wanted information about the area where I'm from, about my relatives and neighbours. They said if I did not give them the information they would not let me leave," he told AFP. He was later sent back to Gaza. "It is not less than torture, what the Shabak (GSS) is doing at Erez crossing," Dr Ruchama Marton, the founder of PHR-Israel said. The rights group documented cases in which patients were summoned for questioning or to receive exit permits only to be jailed in Israel, and others in which patients did not come to the crossing for fear of being arrested. Israel has sealed the impoverished territory of 1.5 million people off from all but vital humanitarian aid since Hamas - considered a terrorist group by Israel and the West " took power there last year. Israel says it allows patients in need of emergency care to exit quickly, but rights groups say the blockade has gutted local medical facilities, forcing growing numbers of residents to seek advanced care abroad. Meanwhile the number of patients denied entry permits has increased, from 10 percent in the first half of 2007 to 35 percent in the first half of 2008, according to PHR-Israel, which assists nearly all those who are denied permits. The World Health Organisation said in April that between October 1 and March 2, 32 patients died in Gaza after the permits they requested were delayed or refused.