Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) issued a written statement on Monday calling for the immediate release of all Palestinian health workers it says are being “arbitrarily detained” by Israeli authorities.
“MSF is outraged by the treatment of health professionals, the majority of whom are being held in appalling conditions, without justification or cause,” the organisation said.
The statement lends MSF’s voice to a growing chorus demanding the release of Hussam Abu Safiya, a paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, who has been detained since December 2024. MSF said the doctor, recently placed in isolation, has been subjected to torture — an allegation raised shortly after UN investigators and the organisation’s own human rights experts sounded the alarm over his treatment.
MSF said Dr Abu Safiya’s case is not an isolated one, but part of a broader pattern of “the imprisonment and targeting of health personnel throughout Palestine.”
Israeli authorities said earlier this month that the doctor’s detention is lawful, and disputed reports that he suffers from a life-threatening condition.
Around 50 people — including doctors, trade unionists and pro-Palestinian activists — gathered outside the French Foreign Ministry in Paris last Thursday to demand his release.
MSF also highlighted the case of Dr Mohammed Obeid, an orthopaedic surgeon arrested by Israeli forces on 26 October 2024 while treating patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital. The organisation said he has now been “detained in Israel for over 600 days, in difficult conditions and without any contact with his family,” and called for his “immediate and unconditional release.”
“The practice of arbitrary imprisonment, torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian health professionals is unacceptable,” MSF said. “For too long, too much of the international community has remained passive in the face of Israel’s actions in Palestine… Silence has become complicity.”
The NGO said 15 of its own colleagues have been killed in Gaza since the war between Israel and Hamas began, out of more than 1,700 health workers reported killed in total. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The Israeli military currently occupies more than 60% of the Gaza Strip, where deadly incidents continue on a near-daily basis despite the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that has held since 10 October 2025.
