World Medical Association Faces Crucial Test as Delegates Gather to Address Detained Palestinian Medics

Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya appears via video link at the Israeli Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem on June 10, 2026. More than 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed during the conflict in Gaza, while Israel has detained hundreds more without charges. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics who stayed to treat the wounded have themselves become casualties of this war.

When medical staff are killed, imprisoned, or disappeared, patients lose the people they rely on to keep them alive. Delegates gathering in Rotterdam this week for the General Assembly of the World Medical Association (WMA) must address this critical issue. The fate of their Palestinian colleagues should be put on the table as a test of whether the world's governing body of medical ethics still means what it says.

The WMA previously recognized the seriousness of these issues by adopting a resolution on the protection of healthcare in conflict. The challenge now is ensuring that every medical association explicitly supports it and uses its influence to pressure governments to act. Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the pediatrician who headed Kamal Adwan Hospital before Israeli forces stormed it in December 2024, serves as a prominent face for this crisis. Held for more than 22 months without charge under Israel's Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, he reportedly endures prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, severe weight loss, and untreated pre-existing conditions. An international petition for his release has gathered signatures from more than 970 medical professionals across 41 countries.

Other detained medical professionals include Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, a 71-year-old family physician from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and Dr Mohammed Hassan Ali Obeid, a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) colleague and orthopedic surgeon who has been detained for over 600 days without charge. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded 1,000 attacks on healthcare resulting in numerous deaths and injuries in Gaza since October 7, 2023, alongside hundreds of similar attacks in the West Bank.

The WMA Assembly should speak plainly about these events, call publicly for the release of detained Palestinian doctors, and back independent investigations into attacks on healthcare. Healthcare workers are not targets, and the Rotterdam assembly faces a fundamental duty to uphold the ethical responsibilities of the WMA.