How has Israel been handling Gazan doctors with alleged connections to Hamas and other Gazan terror groups, and how could it be doing better?
In December 2024, the IDF arrested Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician and hospital director who wrote op-eds for The New York Times.
He has been in some form of administrative detention for almost 18 months since then, although no formal criminal charges have been filed.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), an NGO that says it “views the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territory as a root cause of multiple human rights violations, including the right to health and actively advocates for its end,” had planned for its representatives to visit four Gazan doctors, like Abu Safiya, being held at Israel’s Keziot prison on Monday.
Later on Monday, PHRI said that, when its representatives arrived at Keziot, deep in Israel’s South, they were unceremoniously told that the visit had been canceled due to an unidentified “major event.”
When asked for more details about the incident, the Israel Prison Service had not responded by press time.
Furthermore, PHRI has said that “an Israeli court is set to hold a hearing on a request by the Military Advocate General to extend Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention,” on Tuesday.
PHRI has stated that it is expected to file a petition to the High Court of Justice on Thursday demanding Abu Safiya’s release, as well as the release of 13 additional physicians from Gaza held in Israeli custody.
Like Abu Safiya, who has at times been denied access to legal counsel, the four physicians who PHRI hoped to visit at Ketziot Prison have had limited outside access and transparency, which is often the case in facilities with significant Shin Bet involvement.
This is why the PHRI visit is so important, though such visits were nearly nonexistent during the war.
PHRI has said that some of the 14 detained doctors from Gaza, including surgeons, cardiologists, and hospital directors, have been held in Israeli custody since late 2023, and that none of them have been formally charged.
Why aren’t these doctors being indicted? And, more importantly, why aren’t they being given due process protections, which is standard after a period of days or weeks when Israel (or other democratic governments) wants to continue holding a suspect?
The number of Palestinians being held in administrative detention – or, in this case, under the unlawful combatants law – during the war has collectively spiked to roughly 4,000. This is in stark contrast to the pre-war average, which was closer to 1,000, and a mid-1990s average of single digits.
When the war was at its greatest intensity, it made sense to hold Palestinians who were likely to be potentially dangerous. This prevented them from aiding Hamas on and off the battlefield, even if there was no public evidence of them directly or recently participating in violence.
It also made sense to hold Palestinians generally connected with Hamas in extended detention. For one, they could potentially be traded for the 250 Israeli hostages that Hamas held at various points during the war.
Of course, it was preferable to criminally indict such individuals. That way, they could be sent to jail through standard criminal proceedings.
But Israeli law, and some other legal systems, recognize that there can be cases where intelligence can prove with relative certainty that an individual is a terrorist, but that this cannot be proven in a standard criminal trial. This occurs when intelligence sources and methods would need to be revealed to both the defense and the terrorist to be used as evidence during a criminal trial.
Some of those who have criticized Israel for holding these physicians have portrayed the cases as black and white, as if Hamas were not deeply embedded in all or nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals.
In contrast, The Jerusalem Post, during visits to Gaza, personally witnessed how deeply embedded Hamas was in some of Gaza’s hospitals; this included vast amounts of weapons and interconnected tunnels for senior Hamas officials.
In addition, prior to the IDF’s invasion of Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza in November 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered the hostage Noa Marciano in the area of the hospital.
Documentation published at the time by Israel showed Hamas terrorists taking two hostages, a Nepali citizen and a Thai citizen, into Shifa Hospital, with one wounded and being led to a hospital bed, and the other walking.
Additional documentation followed, proving hostages, including an infant, had been held in a portion of Rantisi Hospital in Gaza.
Hamas systematically used Gaza hospitals as command centers
This, as well as vast amounts of additional evidence, puts to rest the idea that Gaza’s hospitals were all innocent and supports Israel’s contention that Hamas systematically used them as command centers.
The Post also confirmed with the IDF that their position is that Abu Safiya was involved with Hamas and terrorism, though they would not give specifics.
NGO Monitor has provided specific evidence, including visual, connecting Abu Safiya to Hamas.
Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, has said, “We don’t know at this stage what the various individuals, like Abu Safiya, were in connection with.”
He has added, “But we do know, because we now have pictures of him sitting with Hamas military leaders. We know what his rank was.”
Abu Safiya wrote publicly, “as a doctor, as an expert in theory,” while “at the same time, he was a colonel in Hamas.” Steinberg called such conduct, and the use of hospitals for armed purposes, “absolutely a violation of all medical ethics and international law.”
Doesn’t all of this mean that Abu Sufiya is getting what he deserves?
Not necessarily.
Even if he theoretically deserves prison time, the costs it is imposing on Israel compared to the gains, especially six months after Israel and Hama ended the war, do not match up.
What is critical here is how Israel analyzes the indefinite detention of someone who most of the world views as a physician, and who Israel views as a dual physician-terrorist collaborator. This analysis should not be the same as it was during the war.
What is the rationale for indefinite detention post-war?
During the war – when Hamas was holding Israeli hostages – there was some logic to withstanding the punishing global criticism of holding a physician (and possible terrorist) in detention on an extended, if temporary, basis.
But what is the rationale post-war?
Israel is now refraining from targeting some of Hamas’s worst and most violent leaders.
It still targets Hamas terrorists occasionally, but almost all of them are reactive, meaning when they approach IDF forces near the yellow ceasefire line in Gaza.
Israel has likely released some of Hamas’s most vile terrorists as part of the deal in which it sent back 2,000 mostly Hamas-linked prisoners in October 2025, when the war ended.
So what exactly is accomplished by holding dual-hat physicians, who could be, at worst, Hamas collaborators?
This question is most relevant because the benefits of holding them remain vague and often come at sky-high costs.
There was hope that, with the war’s end, some critics of Israel (including many confused fair-minded Americans, Western Europeans, Canadians, and Japanese persons – not antisemites who are against Israel no matter what) might re-engage with the Jewish state.
Instead, one of the continued problems with re-engaging such people has been Israel’s other issues. For example, Israel has failed to fully uphold its own laws (as with Jewish violence against West Bank Palestinians), and it has continued its wartime policies that have lost their logic and continue to turn off such fair-minded people.
There is an additional problem: these 14 Gazan physicians are not the first to be detained.
On November 23, 2023, the IDF detained the director of Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya.
Although Hamas was using Shifa Hospital both as a terror base and to conceal hostages, there was never any concrete proof publicly produced that Abu Salmiya was directly involved with this.
Back in November 2023, a senior IDF source told the Post that Abu Salmiya had given suspicious answers when questioned about what he knew about Hamas’s systematic usage of his hospital. However, the source said that suspicious answers without evidence cannot usually be used to hold someone in administrative detention for more than seven months.
Abu Salmiya had at least four non-standard non-criminal detention extension hearings before the courts, but was eventually released on July 1, 2024, without charge. In addition, there was no explanation of why no indictment was filed or why he was released.
This was despite the extended periods during which Abu Salmiya was prevented from meeting with a lawyer.
In March 2024, the IDF reinvaded Shifa Hospital, killing or arresting several hundred Hamas terrorists.
By then, however, Abu Salmiya had been in detention for several months. Thus, he certainly could not be charged with anything related to Hamas’s blatant terror activities during that period.
Why, then, have some of these physicians been held for more than twice as long as the notorious chief of Shifa Hospital, including six months post-war?
Hopefully, it is not because when Abu Salmiya was released in July 2024, opposition politicians and government ministers publicly berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his release.
At the time, Netanyahu issued a statement saying he did not know who was being released, indicating he was very concerned about being blamed in the domestic political sphere.
One hopes that when making such momentous decisions, Netanyahu will take into account the impact on Israel’s dangerously fragile global standing rather than on domestic politics.
In a recent op ed, former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Yaakov Katz wrote, “A country at war is not one the average American wants to be identified with.” He did not mention this specific issue, though he did note the violence in the West Bank and other problems. Either way, holding these alleged dual-hat physicians in the post-war period is carrying high costs with unclear benefits, especially when nearly all of the intelligence evidence remains secret.
Mathilda Heller contributed to this report.