KVIG Informative

Fifteen doctors from Gaza have been held in Israeli detention for as long as two years. None has been charged with a crime.

Dr. Hassan Khalil Almukayed, a vascular surgeon, was taken from Kamal Adwan Hospital in October 2024 after refusing to evacuate patients during an Israeli raid on northern Gaza. His brother Mahmoud, a nurse arrested alongside him, was released in the October 2025 prisoner swap. Hassan was not. He is now held at Ktziot Prison in the Negev, where nearly all of Gaza’s detained doctors are kept.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel represents 14 of the detained doctors in a petition before Israel’s Supreme Court. The group’s Ahmad Abbas said all of them are being starved and face physical violence from prison guards on a near-weekly basis. More than 350 healthcare workers were detained during the war, according to PHRI; roughly 55 remain in custody, including the 15 senior doctors.

The most prominent of them is Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, the pediatrician who directed Kamal Adwan Hospital and was seized in December 2024. He has been held without charge for more than 18 months under administrative detention, a legal mechanism that allows Israel to jail someone indefinitely without trial based on classified evidence. His lawyer, Nasser Odeh, said in a July court filing that Abu Safia was barely recognizable during their last visit, his face and neck marked with fresh bruises. Odeh said Abu Safia told him: they brought me here to kill me. Israel’s prison service called the allegations false and without factual basis.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reviewed Abu Safia’s case and found Israel had violated multiple articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The group called for his immediate release and compensation, and said his case may point to a wider pattern of arbitrary detention in Israel’s prison system.

Israel disputes the framing. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Hamas embedded operations inside Gaza hospitals, including weapons storage and tunnels beneath facilities such as Shifa Hospital, and cites this as justification for detaining medical staff who worked in those buildings. Before October 7, 2023, administrative detentions in Israel averaged about six months. Some of the doctors held today have already passed that mark by a factor of six.

Dr. Mazen Al-Rantisi, a West Bank physician known locally as the Doctor of the Poor for treating patients who could not pay, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on his Ramallah home in June. Israeli authorities have not disclosed why he was detained or where he is being held. Palestinian human rights sources say Israel has arrested roughly 360 doctors and healthcare workers since 2023, with about 82 still in custody.

Nadia Almukayed has not told her husband’s children that their grandfather, also trapped inside Kamal Adwan during the raid, has since died. Hassan does not know either. He has been in prison long enough that the news would have to wait for a visit that Israel has not yet allowed.