Who are the 75 doctors from Gaza still held in Israel’s prisons?
An original 10,000-word report about the 75 Palestinian doctors and medical staff detained by Israeli forces in Gaza and still imprisoned, drawing on research by Palestinian healthcare workers.
An extraordinary photo, taken by an unidentified Israeli soldier and posted on social media, of doctors, medical staff and patients, stripped to their underwear and facing questioning outside Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza in November 2024.
My new article on my website, Who Are the 75 Doctors and Medical Staff from Gaza Still Held in Israel’s Gruesome Prisons for Palestinians?, which I hope you have time to look at, is an original 10,000-word report about the 75 Palestinian doctors and medical staff detained by Israeli forces in Gaza and still held in their vile torture prisons, who, for the most part, have been held for between 500 and 900 days without charge or trial, in deeply inhumane conditions involving torture, starvation and medical neglect.
I was inspired to write the report because, after regularly joining calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the brave director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was finally seized by Israeli forces on December 27, 2004, after keeping the hospital operational for three months during a “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, I realized that most of the world knows nothing about the other doctors and medical staff still held.
My report draws on extensive and invaluable research undertaken by Healthcare Workers Watch, a Palestinian-led project monitoring the detention of doctors and other healthcare workers in Gaza, whose latest update confirmed the identities of 75 doctors and medical staff from Gaza who are still held. HWW listed those detained by profession, but I rearranged the information to reflect the dates they were seized, which establishes more clearly the patterns of detention in connection with Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, which was particularly prominent in the first 15 months of the genocide.
My chronological list highlights three particular phases of detention — at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in February 2024, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March 2024, and at Kamal Adwan Hospital in October and December 2024, and it’s noticeable that, while Israel was determined to destroy all of Gaza’s hospitals, to create a genocidal healthcare crisis, its focus on these three hospitals, which were repeatedly attacked, was also because of an obsession with seeking to establish, unsuccessfully, that they were militarily connected to Hamas, and, to a lesser degree, that Israeli hostages from October 7 may have been treated there after they were first seized.
To augment the research undertaken by HWW, I undertook extensive internet searches to discover more information about those still held, but in many cases I was unable to find any news, so if you can fill in any gaps, please do get in touch so that I can update the list on an ongoing basis.
Read the report here, and please share it if you appreciate the time and effort that went into it to try to shine a light on these mostly forgotten victims of Israel’s depraved “war” on Gaza’s hospitals and its entire healthcare system.
Other new posts to read
I’ve been posting a number of Notes over the last few days, which have been well received, so please feel free to check them out if you haven’t seen them:
This should have been Hind Rajab’s 8th birthday
Detained flotilla activist Thiago Ávila dictated a poignant letter to his baby daughter
Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra wins a Pulitzer Prize for his compelling photos from Gaza
Filton 6 trial verdict: four guilty of criminal damage, two cleared
Gaza’s deadly health crisis: rats, sewage and the spread of diseases
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