Fw: The Gazan doctors still languishing in Israeli prisons
annick ferauge
The Gazan doctors still languishing in Israeli prisons
While some were released in the ceasefire, Israel still holds 80 Palestinian medical workers without charge. Their families are demanding their freedom.
In partnership with
When Dr. Ahmad Al-Farra turned his phone camera around in his office at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, placards reading “Freedom to Dr. Abu Teima” and “We will not leave you” appeared on my screen. They were held by Nahed Abu Teima’s wife and children, who have not spoken to him in nearly two years.
Abu Teima was the director of the surgical ward at Nasser Hospital until Israeli forces detained him during a February 2024 raid on the medical complex. I spoke with his family after asking Al-Farra, the head of the hospital’s pediatric and maternity ward, what he knew about the seven colleagues taken in that same raid.
Their names appear on a list published by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), identifying 17 Gazan doctors — and 80 medical workers overall — who remain in Israeli custody even after Israel’s release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees at the start of the ceasefire.
Held without charge or trial in dire conditions, these doctors are denied contact with the outside world, save for infrequent lawyer visits. They face physical violence, medical neglect, and starvation, as a result of which dozens of detainees have died. Yet even when their cases draw significant public attention — like that of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, detained since December 2024 — it has done little to bring about their release.
A few months ago, I took part in a PHRI social media campaign in which Israeli doctors like myself read the testimonies of detained Gazan physicians. I read out the following words: “We need antibiotics and medicines for infections … Sometimes I perform surgeries on prisoners, clean the abscess, open it with a piece of plastic, and disinfect with some chlorine.” It was only after speaking with Abu Teima’s family that I learned the testimony was his.
Since his detention, Abu Teima has been permitted to see his lawyer only once every six months. After their most recent meeting in early October, the lawyer informed the family that he has lost 25 kilograms, is beaten daily, is told he will never be released, and is being denied his regular blood pressure medication.
At the time of his arrest, Abu Teima had been living with his wife, Arwa, and their nine children inside Nasser Hospital, alongside many other families of medical staff. Israel had destroyed their home in Khan Younis early in the war, and they believed the hospital would offer some protection from the airstrikes.
When the Israeli army raided the medical complex, Abu Teima’s family evacuated but he insisted on staying behind to care for the patients who remained. It was the last time his family saw or spoke to him.
Only in August 2024, with the help of PHRI, did they receive confirmation that he was being held at Ketziot Prison in southern Israel. Their first indirect contact, through a lawyer, came three months later — nearly nine months after his arrest.
Since then, Arwa and the children have been living in a tent in Khan Younis. A practicing gynecologist, she has managed to support the family alone, but it has not been easy: Doctors in Gaza have received no steady salaries since the start of the war, only sporadic lump-sum payments every two to three months
One of her younger sons, Yousef, smiled brightly throughout our conversation despite suffering from heat stroke and an infectious abscess in his leg. When the family came to the hospital to protest for Abu Teima’s release, Al-Farra administered IV fluids and antibiotics; without their connection to the hospital, Yousef’s treatment would have been far harder to secure.
“We lose one child in the hospital every day because of a lack of equipment,” Al-Farra told +972. Medications for diabetes, hypertension, and hypothyroidism are scarce. The hospital has run out of test tubes for blood work, and its intensive care units operate without essential infusion equipment.
Although more food has entered Gaza since the ceasefire, Al-Farra explained, staples like meat, milk, eggs, and fresh produce remain largely unavailable. And despite a surge in patients arriving from shuttered hospitals in the north, Nasser has received no additional medical supplies.
When I asked Arwa how I could support her, she refused the idea of raising money for her family until her husband returns. What she needed, she said, was for us to protest, to write, and to make noise. “Power,” she said, “not money or food.”
Weight loss and skin diseases
After my conversation with Arwa Abu Teima, Al-Farra’s phone was passed to the wife and two daughters of Dr. Ghassan Abu Zuhri, the chief of orthopedic surgery at Nasser Hospital and a widely respected specialist in joint replacements.
In 2017, Abu Zuhri spent a year practicing at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, northern Israel, where he was invited to stay on. Instead, he chose to return to Gaza to be with his family. Before the war, his expertise often took him across the West Bank to perform surgeries.
Rima, his wife, teaches mathematics in schools and colleges and now supports the family on her own. Twelve members of the extended family share a single tent in Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza, after their home in Khan Younis was destroyed during the war.
Rima and the children have not spoken to Abu Zuhri since his detention. His lawyer has been permitted to see him only twice. During the first visit, Abu Zuhri, who had no prior medical conditions, appeared to suffer from scabies — which the Israeli authorities have allowed to spread rampantly inside prisons during the war — and severe fatigue. By the second visit, he had lost 30 kilograms.
Dr. Al-Farra emphasized again and again that Abu Zuhri has no political affiliation of any kind — that he is simply a good man and a physician who upheld his Hippocratic oath, treating every patient regardless of religion, race, or gender.
Only after the family left the room did he explain why he needed to underline this point. “We think he treated two Israeli hostages, and that’s why he is being denied release,” Al-Farra said. “But you see, he treated them the way he treats every patient.”
Lastly, I spoke with the family of Dr. Omar Ammar, a 67-year-old retired gynecologist from Khan Younis who helped popularize the use of Pap tests to detect cervical cancer in Gaza. Unlike the other doctors who were detained during the Israeli army’s raid on Nasser Hospital, Ammar disappeared in March 2024 as the army encircled Khan Younis.
His wife, Jihan, and their daughters learned he was in detention only when they recognized him in a photo circulating on social media — a group of Palestinian men stripped, blindfolded, and kneeling in a large, empty pool, guarded by Israeli soldiers.
It took Jihan months to confirm his whereabouts. According to testimony Ammar gave to PHRI in October 2024, eight months after his arrest, he had been transferred between three facilities before being placed in Nafha Prison in the Negev/Naqab, where he has remained since June.
Through the Red Cross, which connected her with PHRI, Jihan was able to secure a lawyer, who has met with Ammar twice. The lawyer reported that he has lost 25 kilograms, is losing his hair, and has developed scabies but is not provided clean clothes. Nafha Prison offers no soap; detainees are attacked by guard dogs and are deliberately woken every two to three hours throughout the night.
Jihan and the couple’s three children have been displaced 15 times since the start of the war and now live in a tent in Deir Al-Balah. Both daughters suffer from low blood pressure and have each lost more than 10 kilograms. Jihan herself lives with diabetes, hypertension, and chronic heart problems, and has been unable to access her routine medications for months.
“I’d rather die than move elsewhere again,” she told +972. “I can’t do it anymore. The war changed me completely.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.