WMA Urged to Demand Release of Jailed Palestinian Medics

More than 1,700 health workers have been killed in the war in Gaza. Israel also holds hundreds of others without charge. Doctors, nurses and paramedics — those who stayed behind to treat the wounded — have become victims of the war itself.

When health workers are killed, detained or go missing, they are not the only ones who pay the price. Patients lose the people they depend on to stay alive.

That is what delegates at this week's General Assembly of the World Medical Association (WMA) in Rotterdam need to keep in mind. The fate of their Palestinian colleagues belongs on the agenda — not merely as a point of debate, but as a test of whether the world's leading medical ethics body still stands by what it claims.

Last year the WMA recognised the gravity of these issues when it adopted a resolution on protecting health care in conflict. It was an important step and a reaffirmation of the principle of medical neutrality. The challenge now is to ensure every medical association is committed to backing that resolution and uses its influence to press governments into action.

If the WMA General Assembly needs a face for this issue, it could be Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the paediatrician who served as director of Kamal Adwan Hospital — the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza until Israeli forces stormed it in December 2024.

He has been held for more than 22 months without charge under Israel's Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits indefinite detention. He is reported to remain in prolonged solitary confinement, to have been beaten, to have lost significant weight and to be denied treatment for underlying conditions. An international petition calling for his release has drawn more than 970 signatures from medical professionals in 41 countries.

Held alongside him is Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, 71, a family doctor from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank known as the "doctor of the poor." He was arrested in June in a pre-dawn raid on his home.

Also detained is our longtime colleague at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Mohammed Hassan Ali Obeid, a respected 43-year-old Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon and father of three, who has been held under Israel's Unlawful Combatants Law for more than 600 days without charge.

Although some detained health workers have been released, more than 80 remain in Israeli custody, along with at least a dozen others seized from the West Bank.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented 1,000 attacks on health facilities, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and 1,700 injuries in Gaza since October 7, 2023. About 90 percent of Gaza's health infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. In August 2025, UN experts declared that the systematic destruction of the health system amounted to "medicide."

In the West Bank, where no wartime emergency exists, the WHO has also recorded more than 1,000 attacks on health facilities since October 7, 2023, with 42 people killed and at least 218 injured.

Ambulances are stopped at checkpoints and their crews detained. Health workers trying to reach the wounded during settler attacks are also blocked. Dialysis and cancer patients are confined to their homes because checkpoints make treatment impossible. Medics have been shot, detained and killed in Israeli military raids.

All of this reflects a deliberate, systematic effort by Israel to destroy Palestinians' ability to deliver care, consistent with a clear and brazen disregard for Palestinian life.

The WMA General Assembly 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 push for independent access to those still held. And it should back independent investigations into attacks on health facilities in Gaza and the West Bank, with findings published wherever they lead.

This is an opportunity to bring collective pressure on fellow medical associations, political bodies and any relevant institution to push for action.

What is before the Rotterdam assembly is an obligation — to reaffirm forcefully, structurally and universally the founding principle of the WMA: that membership carries ethical responsibilities that do not shift with geography or alliances.

Health workers are not targets. Either the white coat deserves protection everywhere, or it is protected nowhere. The test is not only whether we assert these principles, but whether we uphold them when it matters most.

The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.