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

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

By October ۲۰۲۴, 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 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 ۱۵ 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 ۱۸ 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 ۲۰۲۴, 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, ۱۳, and daughters Malak, ۱۱, and Hala, ۸.

“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 ۲۵, ۲۰۲۴, 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 died

Hassan Almukayed has now spent nearly ۲۱ 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 ۲۰۲۵ 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 ۷۰s, 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 Jabalia

To the people of Gaza’s Jabalia camp, where Hassan Almukayed was born in ۱۹۷۲, 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 ۲۰۱۰ 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.

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.

‘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 ۳۵۰ healthcare workers were detained during the genocidal war.

He said their removal “left the community in the north of Gaza without health services” and forced the civilians to move to the south.

PHRI says some ۵۵ healthcare workers are still being held by Israel, including ۱۵ senior doctors. The nonprofit group represents ۱۴ of them, including Hassan Almukayed and Abu Safia, in its petition for their release before the Israeli Supreme Court.

Abbas described the conditions in which the doctors have been imprisoned.

“All of them are being starved. All of them are facing, if not daily, a weekly physical violence by prison guards,” he said.

At Sde Teiman, the cell lights never go off.

“We are allowed to sleep just at night – ۱۱ at night, with the light on,” Almukayed reportedly told his lawyer from the prison. If detainees fell asleep during the day, the guards shouted at them through the loudspeakers, he said.

Almukayed has diabetes and suffers from high blood pressure. He has periodically been deprived of his medicine, and was left with untreated scabies for weeks, Abbas said.

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

Nadia Almukayed said that other Palestinian prisoners released by Israel have told her that her husband has lost ۴۰kg (۸۸ pounds).

Al Jazeera approached the Israel Prison Service and the Israeli military for comment on the various allegations made by the prisoners’ families and lawyers, but has not received a response from either.

Asked why the doctors remain imprisoned without charge months after a “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas was agreed upon, Abbas said: “We believe the state of Israel is afraid of the voices of Dr Abu Safia, Dr Hassan Almukayed and other doctors.”

At a court hearing in June, a photo of Abu Safia – that also circulated online – showed that Israeli guards had beaten him “brutally with hammers and batons”, said Abbas.

Hassan Almukayed’s lawyers say they have only seen him four times since his arrest ۱۸ months ago. The last time was in January, with visits subsequently suspended after the United States and Israel started a war on Iran in late February.

Devastated Gaza a ‘heaven’ compared with prison ‘hell’

After Hassan Almukayed’s brother, Mahmoud, was freed, he came back to his home in ruins and the family forced to live in a tent, Shaheen, Almukayed’s nephew, told Al Jazeera.

Despite his shock at the scale of destruction, Mahmoud still described the Israeli prison as “a life of hell”, while Gaza – for its utter decimation – remained a “heaven” by comparison.

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

Before his imprisonment, Almukayed’s mother died of a stroke while in his arms because the fighting in Jabalia had made it impossible to reach a hospital. The family’s home in Jabalia is gone. Nadia Almukayed and their children live in a tent in al-Mawasi, pitched beside Shaheen’s family’s tent.

Nadia keeps the household afloat by working as a mathematics teacher for UNRWA, the UN agency created in ۱۹۴۹ to help the Palestinians forced from their homes when Israel was founded.

She says the struggle of living in a tent is less financial than psychological. “I am exhausted from this life I am living, and from the responsibility that rests on my shoulders,” she told Al Jazeera.

Sometimes, she said she loses patience with her kids, with her husband not around. The hardest part, she added, is watching her eldest son, Muhammad, reach adolescence without his father to guide him.

Nadia explained that she sends messages to her husband through his lawyers when they visit him. Hassan, she said, writes back, referencing the family milestones he has been missing.

During the most recent visit, Hassan Almukayed’s message to his wife was: “Can you please make a cake for Hala? Her birthday is two days from now.”

Every time Abbas met his client, the three Almukayed children would wait with excitement. “They would open up the audio recording of the report the lawyer sent after every visit and listen to it together,” Nadia Almukayed said.

On their birthdays, they talk to Nadia about the parties they used to organise before the genocidal war.

“They would say: ‘If only Baba was with us, he would have made us a party. If only Baba was with us, he would have taken us to the sea. If only, if only.”