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

Hassan Khalil Almukayed is among at least 15 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently in Israeli detention.Dr Hassan Khalil Almukayed was taken by Israeli forces from Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza in October 2024 [Courtesy of Nemer Shaheen]Published On 15 Jul 2026The last time Nadia Almukayed saw her husband, Dr Hassan Khalil Almukayed, was inside the Gaza hospital he had refused to leave.By October 2024, Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian enclave had closed in on the Almukayed family, including his father and other relatives.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Hospital workers wounded in Israeli drone attack on Gaza’s Kamal Adwanlist 2 of 4UN inquiry urges release of Palestinian doctor jailed by Israellist 3 of 4Detained Gaza doctor Hussam Abu Safia shows signs of torture, family sayslist 4 of 4‘They brought me here to kill me’ says Gaza doctor in Israeli prisonend of listAs 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.‘We both know what’s going to happen’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.When Israeli tanks stormed Kamal Adwan in October 2024, the soldiers ordered the families out and onto the road south on foot. The Israeli army, Nadia said, “promised the doctors they would not be harmed and would not be arrested”, as it directed them to return to their departments.“The occupation [force], of course, was not truthful in its promises,” she said.As she bid her husband a teary farewell, she told him: “We both know what is going to happen, but we have to accept God’s will and be patient so that He will give us strength and comfort.”Nadia recalled Hassan answering: “God willing.”She walked away with their three children: son Muhammad, 13, and daughters Malak, 11, and Hala, 8.“I remained in contact with him by phone until midnight the following night, when communication suddenly stopped,” Nadia told Al Jazeera. “At that moment, I knew Hassan had been detained.”Naji Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), which handles the cases of nearly all “kidnapped” doctors, dates Hassan Almukayed’s arrest to October 25, 2024, two months before Israeli forces captured Abu Safia.They are being held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits indefinite detention without trial, a category, Abbas said, “that doesn’t exist in international law”.Hassan doesn’t know his father diedHassan Almukayed has now spent nearly 21 months in Israeli detention without charge. He was initially taken to Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and held there for seven months.Also detained with him was his brother, Mahmoud, a nurse at the hospital. The family’s first proof of where the men had been taken was a photograph they saw online of Mahmoud, stripped to his underwear, being loaded onto a military truck bound for Israel.Mahmoud was released in the October 2025 prisoner swap deal, part of a “ceasefire” agreement between Hamas and Israel. But Hassan was not. In June last year, he was transferred to Ktziot, also known as Negev Prison, where nearly all the other Palestinian doctors are held.The brothers do not yet know that their father, Khalil Almukayed, is dead.Khalil was also trapped inside Kamal Adwan, alongside his sons, when the hospital was overrun. For nearly a week, the family did not know if Khalil, in his 70s, had also been taken.Only after they posted about his disappearance online did they learn that he had been released after a brief detention. According to the family, Israeli soldiers confiscated his medicine and handed him a water bottle that was punctured at the bottom.Khalil was let go in what Nemer Shaheen, Khalil’s grandson and a nephew of Hassan Almukayed, said was “a very bad condition, mentally and psychologically”.He died a couple of months later “of sadness and grief over his sons”, Shaheen told Al Jazeera.During her sparse messages to her husband, conveyed through his lawyer, Nadia Almukayed admitted: “I have not told him of his father’s death, out of fear for him.”‘The doctor’ from JabaliaTo the people of Gaza’s Jabalia camp, where Hassan Almukayed was born in 1972, he was simply known as “the doctor”.The eldest among his siblings, Hassan was close to his parents. “To them… he was the very air they breathed,” said Nadia Almukayed.He studied medicine in Romania, practised for some time in Sweden, and returned to Gaza in 2010 to take care of his ageing parents and build a life in the camp. Beyond his hospital shifts, he also ran a clinic from his home.“When people needed medical care, they used to just come and knock on his door – free of charge,” said his nephew, Shaheen, who was evacuated during the war to Egypt, and later Germany, where he is working on a doctoral degree.Nadia Almukayed said: “If a patient came at midnight or in the morning, knocked on the door and wanted ‘Dr Hassan’, Hassan would wake up and bring him to the clinic and deal with him.”She said her husband “served everyone without expecting anything in return”.“There is no malice in his heart,” she added.Dr Hassan Almukayed rides in a cart pulled by a donkey to Kamal Adwan Hospital after his car was destroyed in an Israeli strike in Gaza [Courtesy of Nemer Shaheen]When Israel’s genocidal war divided Gaza into two, Hassan Almukayed was one of only two surgeons remaining in the besieged north. “But he took his medical oath to the max, and he stayed,” said Shaheen.After Almukayed’s car was bombed during the Israeli strikes, he started going to the hospital on a donkey cart.At home, said Nadia Almukayed, he was a “rare kind of husband – kind and gentle”.“I miss him terribly in everything I do, even the smallest things – drinking coffee or watching short videos on my phone,” she said.Whenever their neighbours in the Jabalia camp called for “the doctor”, she said she felt a sense of pride walking beside him.[Al Jazeera]‘All of them are being starved’For Abbas, the PHRI member, what happened at Kamal Adwan was part of a “systemic effort” by Israel to target Gaza’s hospitals and push the Palestinians out.“Each time the Israeli army raided a health facility, they arrested dozens of the staff,” he said, adding that more than 350 healthcare workers were detained during the genocidal war.