On Sunday, Israeli military authorities freed 71-year-old Palestinian physician Mazen al-Rantisi from Ofer prison, after nearly four months of administrative detention that left clear, visible markers of physical mistreatment on his body. A widely shared social media photo captured moments after his release shows the long-serving community doctor emaciated, with a raw, prominent laceration across his forehead.
Al-Rantisi earned the beloved local nickname “the doctor of the poor” over decades of service, operating a free or low-cost community clinic in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah where he regularly waived treatment fees for impoverished patients, distributed free essential medications, and opened his doors as a trusted refuge for low-income Palestinian families who could not access formal healthcare. Israeli forces seized him during a pre-dawn raid on his Ramallah residence on June 21, later filing formal charges against him solely for serving as the board chair of the Union of Health Work Committees, a prominent Palestinian non-profit that delivers free and subsidized medical care to tens of thousands of vulnerable Palestinians annually. Prior to his release, al-Rantisi informed his legal team that he had endured repeated physical assault and deliberate medical neglect behind bars, per a documented Haaretz news report. He confirmed prison officials confiscated all of his prescribed chronic care medications for the first 10 days of his detention, and continued to withhold one critical treatment even after he was transferred to the general prison population.
The abuse al-Rantisi described is far from an isolated case, according to testimonies collected by the independent monitoring group Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW). In a public statement Tuesday, Dr. Ahmed Muhanna, director of Gaza’s Al-Awda Hospital who was released from Israeli detention in January after 665 days of captivity, confirmed that Palestinian medical professionals are explicitly targeted for arbitrary arrest and subjected to disproportionate, brutal treatment behind bars. Muhanna lost nearly a third of his total body weight during his extended detention, and reported that multiple Palestinian detainees have died in custody while Israeli prison personnel stood by without intervening. He added that imprisoned healthcare workers are actively barred from administering emergency care to fellow detainees, even when those detainees sustain life-threatening injuries during violent interrogation sessions.
Dr. Rebecca Inglis, a lead researcher with HWW, emphasized that Israel’s ongoing detention of roughly 100 active Palestinian healthcare workers constitutes a direct violation of core International Humanitarian Law provisions that explicitly protect medical personnel during armed conflict. “We hold profound, urgent concerns for their safety and well-being, given the overwhelming, well-documented body of evidence confirming that Palestinian detainees are systematically subjected to torture and cruel, inhumane treatment in Israeli detention facilities,” she stated.
HWW’s latest verified data records that 80 Palestinian healthcare workers from the Gaza Strip and 14 from the occupied West Bank remain in Israeli custody as of this report, the vast majority abducted by Israeli military forces directly from their workplaces, including hospital wards and active emergency ambulances while they were mid-shift caring for patients. Among the highest-profile remaining detainees is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last fully functional medical facilities operating in the Strip at the end of 2024. Israeli forces seized Abu Safiya in December 2024, after he publicly refused to comply with Israeli evacuation orders that would have shut down the hospital and cut off life-saving care for thousands of displaced and injured patients. He has been held without any formal charges or public trial ever since.
A formal United Nations commission of inquiry has previously documented that Abu Safiya has endured sustained, severe abuse throughout his detention, with his family and legal representatives confirming he exhibits clear physical signs of extreme torture. In early September, Abu Safiya relayed to his legal counsel that Israeli prison guards repeatedly assaulted him across multiple parts of his body, including sensitive areas, using their fists, boots, and batons, while issuing explicit threats to punish him if he disclosed details of his detention conditions to outside parties, per verified reports from Physicians for Human Rights.
Gaza’s official Health Ministry confirms that Israeli military forces have killed more than 1,700 Palestinian healthcare workers and arbitrarily detained 364 total medical staff since the outbreak of the current conflict. HWW adds that six Palestinian healthcare workers have died or been killed while in Israeli custody, with an additional five medical staff unaccounted for, their locations and status entirely unknown to their families. To date, Israeli authorities have refused to return the bodies of the deceased detained healthcare workers to their loved ones for proper burial.