Waiting for Hassan: Another Gaza doctor held by Israel without charge

As Israeli forces intensified their assault on northern Gaza, the family found itself trapped inside the region’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, where Hassan worked as a vascular surgeon. “We could not evacuate northern Gaza quickly,” Nadia told Al Jazeera. “We moved from one place to another in the north until we became trapped inside Kamal Adwan Hospital.”

Hassan Almukayed is one of at least 15 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently in Israeli detention, the most prominent being Kamal Adwan Hospital’s director, Hussam Abu Safia. Last week, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory called for an immediate release of Abu Safia, who has been held without charge in an Israeli prison for more than 18 months.

Rights groups and Abu Safia’s lawyer say there are credible reports he has faced “continued and severe abuse”, including severe torture, and that his life is in imminent danger. Abu Safia and Almukayed were among the Palestinian doctors who refused to leave dozens of newborn infants they were treating after the Israeli military ordered a forced evacuation of northern Gaza.

Nadia Almukayed said her husband kept working as the number of Palestinians, including children, killed and wounded by Israeli forces, kept rising. “From the beginning of the war until Hassan was [taken away], he never stopped serving the patients and the wounded,” she recalled as she huddled with her children inside a tent in al-Mawasi near the southern city of Khan Younis, where camps for the forcibly displaced are now located. During Israel’s genocidal war, Nadia said her husband used to come home for only a few hours every week, just long enough to check on his family before returning to the hospital.