More than 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed during the genocide in Gaza. Israel has detained hundreds more without charges. Doctors, nurses and paramedics who stayed to treat the wounded have themselves become casualties of this war.
When medical staff are killed, imprisoned or disappeared, it is not only they who pay the price. Patients lose the people they rely on to keep them alive. This is something delegates who gather in Rotterdam this week for the General Assembly of the World Medical Association (WMA) must remember.
The fate of their Palestinian colleagues should be put on the table, not as a debating point, but as a test of whether the world’s governing body of medical ethics still means what it says. The WMA already recognised the seriousness of these issues last year by adopting a resolution on the protection of healthcare in conflict. That was an important step and a welcome reaffirmation of the principles of medical neutrality.
The challenge now is to ensure this is followed by the commitment of every medical association to explicitly support it and to use its influence to pressure governments to act. If the WMA Assembly needs a single face for this file, it could be the one of Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the paediatrician who was the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza until Israeli forces stormed it in December 2024. He’s been held now for more than 22 months without charge under Israel’s Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits indefinite detentions.
He reportedly continues to endure prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, severe weight loss and untreated pre-existing conditions. An international petition for his release has drawn the signatures of more than 970 medical professionals from 41 countries. Alongside him stands Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, the 71-year-old family physician from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, known as the “doctor of the poor”.
He was arrested in June in a predawn raid on his home. In addition, our longtime Doctors Without Borders (MSF) colleague, Dr Mohammed Hassan Ali Obeid, a respected 43-year-old Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon and father of three children, has been detained under the Unlawful Combatants Law in Israel for more than 600 days without charge. Although detained health workers have been released, more than 80 remain in Israeli custody alongside at least a dozen arrested from the West Bank.
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