Waiting for Hassan: Another Gazan doctor held by Israel without charge | Israel-Palestine War News

The last time Nadia Almukayed saw her husband, Dr Hassan Khalil Almukayed, he was inside a hospital in Gaza and refused to leave.

By October 2024, Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine had closed for Almukayed’s family, including his father and other relatives.

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As the Israeli army escalates its offensive in northern Gaza, the family is found trapped in Kamal Adwan Hospital, where Hassan works as a neurosurgeon.

“We couldn’t escape north of Gaza fast enough,” Nadia told Al Jazeera. “We went from one place to the other until we were locked up in Kamal Adwan Hospital.”

Hassan Almukayed is one of at least 15 Palestinian doctors from Gaza imprisoned in Israel, most famously the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Hussam Abu Safia.

Last week, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory called for the 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 that he has been subjected to “excessive torture”, including severe torture, and that his life is in danger.

Abu Safia and Almukayed were among the Palestinian doctors who refused to leave several newborn babies they were treating after the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of people from northern Gaza.

‘We all know what’s going to happen’

Nadia Almukayed said her husband continued to work as the number of Palestinians, including children, killed and wounded by Israeli forces continued to rise.

“From the beginning of the war until Hassan (was taken), he did not stop serving the sick and wounded,” he recalls as he joined his children at home. tent in al-Mawasi near the southern city of Khan Younis, where there are refugee camps.

During Israel’s civil war, Nadia said her husband came home for a few hours each week, just enough time to check on his family before returning to the hospital.

When Israeli tanks hit Kamal Adwan in October 2024, the soldiers ordered the families to get out and head to the southern footpath. The Israeli army, Nadia said, “promised the doctors that they would not be harmed and that they would not be arrested”, as they told them to return to their departments.

“The work (energy), of course, was not true in its promises,” he said.

When she said goodbye to her husband crying, she told him: “We all know what will happen, but we must accept God’s will and be patient so that Jehovah will give us strength and comfort us.”

Nadia remembered that Hassan replied: “God willing.”

They left with their three children: son Muhammad, 13, and daughters Malak, 11, and Hala, 8.

“I kept in touch with him on the phone until midnight the next night, when the connection suddenly stopped,” Nadia told Al Jazeera. “At that moment, I knew that Hassan had been arrested.”

Naji Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), which oversees the cases of almost all “kidnapped” doctors, says Hassan Almukayed was detained until October 25, 2024, two months before Israeli forces captured Abu Safia.

They are being held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows for indefinite detention without trial, a category, Abbas said, “which does not exist in international law”.

Hassan does not know that his father is dead

Hassan Almukayed has now spent almost 21 months in prison in Israel without trial. First he was taken to the famous Israel Sde Teiman prison camp and stayed there seven months.

Also arrested with him was his brother, Mahmoud, a nurse at the hospital. The family’s first evidence of where he was taken was a photo they saw online of Mahmoud, stripped to his underwear, being loaded into an Israeli military vehicle.

Mahmoud was released in October 2025 prisoner exchangepart of the “ceasefire” agreement between Hamas and Israel. But Hassan was not there. In June last year, he was transferred to Ktziot, also known as the Negev Prison, where almost all other Palestinian doctors are kept.

The brothers do not know that their father, Khalil Almukayed, has died.

Khalil was also trapped inside Kamal Adwan, along with his sons, when the hospital was flooded. For almost a week, the family did not know if Khalil, in his 70s, had been taken back.

It was only after he posted about his disappearance online that he learned that he had been released from prison for a short time. According to the family, Israeli soldiers took away his medicine and gave him a water bottle that had been drilled into the ground.

Khalil was left with what Nemer Shaheen, Khalil’s granddaughter and Hassan Almukayed’s nephew, said was “very difficult, psychologically and emotionally”.

She died a few months later “sad and sad for her children,” Shaheen told Al Jazeera.

In a few messages to her husband, given through her lawyer, Nadia Almukayed admitted: “I did not tell him about the death of his father because I was afraid of him.”

A ‘doctor’ from Jabalia

To the people of the Jabalia camp in Gaza, where Hassan Almukayed was born in 1972, he is simply known as “the doctor”.

The eldest of his brothers, Hassan, was close to his parents. “For them … it was the air they breathed,” said Nadia Almukayed.

He studied medicine in Romania, practiced for a while in Sweden, and returned to Gaza in 2010 to take care of his elderly parents and build a life in the camp. In addition to his medical shifts, he also ran a clinic from his home.

“When people needed medical help, he would come and knock on his door – for free,” said his nephew, Shaheen, who was evacuated during the war to Egypt, and later to Germany, where he is working on a doctorate.

Nadia Almukayed said: “If a patient comes in the middle of the night or in the morning, and knocks on the door and asks for ‘Dr Hassan’, Hassan gets up and takes him to the hospital to deal with him.”

She said her husband “served everyone without expecting anything in return”.

He added: “There is no malice in his heart.”

When Israel’s war of destruction divided Gaza into two, Hassan Almukayed was one of the only two surgeons left in the besieged north. “But he swore to the hospital to the max, and he stayed,” Shaheen said.

When Almukayed’s car was bombed during the Israeli war, he started going to the hospital on a donkey cart.

At home, said Nadia Almukayed, he was “a rare kind of man – kind and gentle”.

“I miss him so much in everything I do, even the smallest things – drinking coffee or watching short videos on my phone,” she said.

Whenever their neighbors in Jabalia camp call “doctor”, they say they are proud to walk next to him.

‘They are all starving’

For Abbas, a member of PHRI, what happened to Kamal Adwan was part of a “systematic operation” by Israel to target Gaza’s hospitals and push the Palestinian population.

“Every time the Israeli army comes to a hospital, they arrest a lot of people,” he said, adding that more than 350 medical workers were arrested in the deadly crackdown.

He said their withdrawal “left the people of northern Gaza without medical care” and forced civilians to move south.

PHRI says 55 medical workers are still being held by Israel, including 15 senior doctors. The non-profit group is representing 14 of them, including Hassan Almukayed and Abu Safia, in their request for their release before Israel’s Supreme Court.

Abbas explained how the doctors were imprisoned.

He said: “They are all suffering from hunger.”

In Sde Teiman, the cell lights don’t go out.

“We are allowed to sleep at night – 11 at night, light on,” Almukayed told his lawyer in prison. When inmates sleep during the day, the guards yell at them through loudspeakers, he said.

Almukayed has diabetes and suffers from high blood pressure. From time to time he is deprived of his medication, and is left with scabies for weeks, Abbas said.

During Abbas’ visits, Almukayed also told his lawyer that he was not getting enough food.

Nadia Almukayed said that other Palestinian prisoners released by Israel told her that her husband had lost 40kg (88 pounds).

Al Jazeera reached out to the Israel Prison Service and the Israeli military for clarification on the various issues faced by the families and lawyers of the prisoners, but received no response.

Asked why the doctors remain in prison without trial months after a “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas was agreed, Abbas said: “We believe that Israel is afraid of the words of Dr Abu Safia, Dr Hassan Almukayed and other doctors.”

During a court hearing in June, a photo of Abu Safia – which was also circulated online – showed Israeli guards beating him “brutally with hammers and sticks”, Abbas said.

Hassan Almukayed’s lawyers say they have only seen each other four times since he was arrested 18 months ago. The last time was in January, flights were suspended after the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran in late February.

Gaza has destroyed ‘heaven’ compared to prison ‘hell’

After Hassan Almukayed’s brother, Mahmoud, was released, he returned to his house in ruins and the family was forced to live in a tent, Shaheen, Almukayed’s brother’s son, told Al Jazeera.

Although he was shocked by the amount of destruction, Mahmoud still described the Israeli prison as “living hell”, while Gaza – because of its destruction – remained “heaven” in comparison.

But it is not the same Gaza that Hassan Almukayed was taken from.

Before his arrest, Almukayed’s mother died of a stroke in his arms because the war in Jabalia prevented her from reaching the hospital. Their family in Jabalia does not exist. Nadia Almukayed and her children live in al-Mawasi tent, built next to Shaheen’s tent.

Nadia maintains the house by working as a math teacher for UNRWA, the UN agency established in 1949 to help Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes when Israel was established.

He says the struggle of living in a tent is not only financial but also emotional. “I’m tired of the life I’m living, and the responsibility that’s on my shoulders,” he told Al Jazeera.

Sometimes, she said that she lost patience with her children, and her husband was not around. The hardest part, he added, was watching his eldest son, Muhammad, reach adolescence without his father to guide him.

Nadia explained that she sends messages to her husband through his lawyers when she sees him. Hassan, he said, is writing in retrospect, based on family events that he has lost.

During a recent trip, Hassan Almukayed’s message to his wife was: “Can you prepare Hala’s cake?”

Whenever Abbas meets his client, Almukayed’s three children happily wait. “They open the recording of the report that the lawyer sends after each visit and listen together,” said Nadia Almukayed.

On their birthdays, they talk to Nadia about the parties they were planning before the genocide.

He said: “If Father had been with us, He would have made a party for us. If only Father had been with us, He would have taken us to the sea.”