Palestinian Medics Held Without Charge Put the World Medical Association Assembly in Rotterdam on Trial

Delegates of the World Medical Association arrive in Rotterdam this week with a file they already wrote and a government that never answered. Palestinian medics remain in Israeli prisons without charge. From 7 to 10 October the General Assembly, hosted by the Dutch medical association KNMG, has to decide whether a white coat is protected status or a costume Israel is free to jail.

More than 1,700 Palestinian health workers have been killed in the genocide in Gaza, Médecins Sans Frontières said on 20 July 2026, alongside 15 of its own colleagues. Healthcare Workers Watch counted 95 still detained. Through 31 August 2026 the World Health Organization had recorded 1,003 attacks on health care in Gaza, 1,007 people killed in those attacks, and 1,705 injured. All 36 hospitals are damaged. About 53 percent were only partly functional.

The association does not need another study tour. It needs to read its own mail.

What the World Medical Association already put in writing

On 9 July 2026, president Dr Jacqueline Kitulu sent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a third appeal. Letters in November 2025 and on 15 January 2026 had asked Israel to try detained health workers or release them, and to obey international humanitarian law. Nobody wrote back.

The July letter named at least 14 Palestinian physicians from Gaza, most held without formal charge under the Unlawful Combatants Law, some for more than two years. The annex looks like a hospital roster. Dr Akram Abu Odeh, head of orthopaedics at the Indonesian Hospital, has been detained since 22 November 2023. Paediatrician Dr Raed Mahdi since 7 December 2023. Nasser Hospital’s surgical lead, Dr Nahad Abu Taima, since 16 February 2024, in a sweep that also took colleagues from Al-Aqsa, intensive care, and cardiology. Dr Murad Alkuka was taken from Al-Shifa Hospital on 18 March 2024. Vascular surgeon Dr Hassan Almukayed was taken from Kamal Adwan Hospital on 25 October 2024.

Kitulu asked for independent care at once, and for an Istanbul Protocol exam wherever torture is alleged. She asked for a fair trial or unconditional release if there is still no charge, an end to solitary confinement, and access to lawyers and family. The World Medical Association published the appeal on 13 July 2026. Of one prisoner, it said the accounts “raise the most serious concerns for his life.” A Helsinki resolution in October 2024 and a Belgrade council text in April 2026 had already condemned attacks on health workers.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya and a court window that runs into Rotterdam

The face on that annex is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the paediatrician who directed Kamal Adwan Hospital and stayed in northern Gaza after Israeli forces killed his son. On 27 December 2024 troops stormed the hospital, then the last functioning one in the north, and took him. A man in a white coat walking toward an armoured vehicle was the last public image of him free.

He has been held for more than 21 months with no formal charge. The Unlawful Combatants Law lets Israel renew that detention without evidence a public trial would require. On 16 June 2026 the Israeli Supreme Court rejected his appeal and left the order in force until at least October. Amnesty International has called the detention arbitrary.

Since 3 June 2026 he has been in solitary confinement, past the 15 days the Nelson Mandela Rules treat as the edge of torture. A lawyer who saw him on 2 July 2026 found him too exhausted to speak, losing consciousness, with injuries around his eyes, ears, neck, and head. The BMJ carried the line he sent from prison. “They brought me here to kill me.”

Israeli officials point to a 2016 photograph and claim he held rank in Hamas medical services. Gaza’s health ministry rejects that as grounds for imprisonment, and no public charge sheet has appeared. A secret file is not a trial. It is a way to disappear a paediatrician who showed what Israeli attacks did to newborns on his wards. On 13 August 2025, UN experts Tlaleng Mofokeng and Francesca Albanese named the wider policy. “In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide,’” they said, “a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide.”

The surgeon, the family doctor, and the wards they left

Dr Mohammed Obeid, listed in the annex as Muhammad Ubaid, is an orthopaedic surgeon, a father of three, and an MSF colleague since 2018. Days before Israeli forces took him he said, from inside the hospital, “There are no words to describe the situation in Kamal Adwan hospital: it is disastrous.” MSF confirmed his detention on 26 October 2024. By 20 July 2026 he had been held more than 600 days, without charge and without contact with his family. He is still on a letter Netanyahu has not answered.

In the occupied West Bank, Israel cannot claim a battlefield hospital. On 21 June 2026 soldiers arrested Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, a 71-year-old Ramallah physician known as the doctor of the poor, in a predawn raid in al-Tira. He chairs the Union of Health Work Committees, which has run clinics for people who cannot pay since 1985. Physicians for Human Rights Israel told The Guardian the arrest was “another alarming escalation in Israel’s crackdown on Palestinian civil society,” and “not just about one doctor.”

Haaretz reported on 2 August 2026 that al-Rantisi, then at Ofer prison, described beatings, crowding, and food he called unfit to eat. He missed his medicine for 10 days. Once, a medic checked his pulse through a slot in the door. The prison service denied it. A Gaza surgeon and a West Bank family doctor are describing one system.

Attacks on Gaza hospitals and West Bank clinics are one policy

Reuters rapporteret figures WHO humanitarian director Altaf Musani gave in Geneva on 14 August 2026. Attacks on health care in conflict zones were averaging more than four a day, with Gaza among the heaviest shares, and none of more than 10,000 verified attacks worldwide since 2018 had entered an accountability process. In the West Bank the same system had verified 991 attacks on health care by 30 June 2026.

The AEGIS Alliance has reported how Israel tried to force aid groups to hand over Palestinian staff names, a roster that works as a targeting file, even as marked medical vehicles were still hit. Britain’s Foreign Office, in a separate record, was burying evidence of Israeli war crimes, including strikes on hospitals, while the health ministry toll moved past 74,000 dead. The genocide is the strike and the clinic that stays shut. That is why internationale nyheder on this war keeps the paperwork next to the rubble.

Why a suspension vote belongs on the Rotterdam agenda

Physicians outside the hall have already chosen. A June petition with the People’s Health Movement, Artsen voor Gaza, and the health wing of Jewish Voice for Peace asked the World Medical Association to suspend the Israeli Medical Association for failing the Declarations of Geneva and Tokyo. Middle East Eye reported more than 1,300 signatories. By September, Dutch doctors said they carried 5,628 signatures to the KNMG, with a banner listing about 1,800 Palestinian health workers killed. The host association called police on the handover. Organisers called another gathering at Rotterdam’s World Trade Center on 10 October.

Membership is how the Israeli Medical Association borrows an ethical brand while Palestinian doctors sit in solitary. A body that will not oppose the killing of health workers, the demolition of hospitals, or the jailing of named colleagues is not a bystander. Associations that shut the door on members carrying a petition for these same prisoners show how practiced that silence is.

What a white coat is worth when delegates go home

Rotterdam can follow lines the World Medical Association has already signed. Demand the release of the physicians in the July annex, including Abu Safiya, Obeid, and al-Rantisi, or charges in a court people can watch. Require medical access, an end to solitary confinement, and Istanbul Protocol exams. Investigate attacks on care in Gaza and the West Bank and publish the findings. Vote on the Israeli Medical Association’s membership instead of another letter to the prime minister holding the prisoners.

Health workers are not lawful targets, and refusing to leave a ward does not make them unlawful combatants. Either the coat counts in Kamal Adwan Hospital and in Ramallah, or the declarations of Geneva and Tokyo are local habits. The test is whether anyone leaves Rotterdam still treating Israel’s prisons as a subject apart from medicine. The longer record sits in reporting on catastrophic conditions in Gaza and across the nyhedsfil Til iscenesættelsen.