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19-07-2026
GAZA STRIP: The 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.
As 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 media. “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”. (Int’l News Desk)
