Medical Ethics Body Urged to Demand Release of Imprisoned Palestinian Doctors

As the World Medical Association convenes its General Assembly in Rotterdam this week, the international president of Doctors Without Borders is calling on delegates to confront a moral test that, he argues, goes to the heart of the organization's founding principles: the fate of hundreds of Palestinian healthcare workers detained by Israel without charge.

More than 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed during the conflict in Gaza, according to the opinion piece by Javid Abdelmoneim, while hundreds more have been taken into Israeli custody. Physicians, nurses and paramedics who remained at their posts to treat the wounded, he writes, have themselves become casualties of the war.

The consequences of these detentions extend well beyond the individuals involved. When doctors and nurses are killed, imprisoned or disappeared, the patients who depend on them lose the very people keeping them alive. In a healthcare system already devastated by more than two years of conflict, the removal of skilled medical personnel compounds an already catastrophic situation.

At the center of the appeal is Dr Hussam Abu Safia, a paediatrician who served as head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last functioning medical facility in northern Gaza until Israeli forces stormed it in December 2024. He has now been held for more than 22 months without charge under Israel's Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, a statute that permits indefinite detention. Reports indicate he continues to endure prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, severe weight loss and untreated pre-existing medical conditions. An international petition demanding his release has gathered signatures from more than 970 medical professionals across 41 countries.

Abdelmoneim also highlights the case of Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, a 71-year-old family physician from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, widely known as the "doctor of the poor." He was arrested in June during a predawn raid on his home. Additionally, Dr Mohammed Hassan Ali Obeid, a 43-year-old Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon and father of three who worked with Doctors Without Borders for many years, has been detained under the Unlawful Combatants Law for more than 600 days without charge.

While some detained health workers have been released, more than 80 remain in Israeli custody, alongside at least a dozen others arrested in the West Bank. The detentions represent a pattern that the author describes as part of a deliberate and systematic effort to dismantle Palestinians' capacity to provide medical care.

The scale of the crisis is reflected in data compiled by the World Health Organization. Since October 7, 2023, the WHO has recorded 1,000 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and 1,700 injuries. Approximately 90 percent of Gaza's health infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. In August 2025, United Nations experts stated that the systematic destruction of the health system amounted to "medicide" — the killing of a healthcare system itself.

The situation in the West Bank presents its own set of challenges, even without the cover of wartime emergency. The WHO has documented more than 1,000 attacks on healthcare in the territory since October 2023, with 42 deaths and at least 218 injuries. Ambulances are stopped at checkpoints and their crews detained. Medics attempting to reach people injured in settler attacks have themselves been obstructed. Patients requiring dialysis and cancer treatment remain at home because checkpoints make the journey to care impossible, while healthcare workers have been shot, detained and killed during Israeli military raids.

The World Medical Association took an important step last year by adopting a resolution on the protection of healthcare in conflict, a move that reaffirmed the principles of medical neutrality. The challenge now, according to the author, is ensuring that this resolution is followed by concrete commitments from every national medical association to explicitly support it and to use their influence to pressure governments to act.

The Rotterdam assembly, Abdelmoneim argues, should speak plainly about what is happening. It should publicly call for the release of detained Palestinian doctors, including Abu Safia, al-Rantisi and Obeid. It should press for independent access to those still being held. And it should endorse independent investigations into attacks on healthcare in Gaza and the West Bank, with findings made public regardless of where they lead.

The author frames the gathering as an opportunity to collectively pressure fellow medical associations, political authorities and relevant bodies to take meaningful action. What lies before the assembly, he writes, is a duty — one that reaffirms loudly, structurally and universally the founding proposition of the World Medical Association: that membership carries an ethical responsibility which does not bend with geography or alliances.

The appeal concludes with a stark formulation of the principle at stake. Healthcare workers are not targets, Abdelmoneim writes, and either a white coat is worth protecting everywhere or it is protected nowhere. The test, he argues, is not simply whether the medical community affirms these principles, but whether it upholds them when it matters most.