In Rome, Italy, on January 12, 2025, sanitarians demonstrate for the National Mobilization Day for the Protection of Gaza's Sanitarians and Patients.

Twenty months after the current campaign of violence began in Gaza, hundreds of Palestinian health care workers remain unlawfully detained or disappeared in Israel’s prison system, say medical staff and aid organisations who call it a violation of international humanitarian law that exacerbates the territory’s already-worsening health care crisis.

More than two dozen civil society organizations — including medical groups whose doctors were taken by Israeli forces — signed a statement on Monday demanding the immediate and unconditional release of health workers, as well as an end to the seemingly arbitrary detentions and wider attacks on Gaza’s health care system.

“Instead of protection, hundreds of health workers have been forcibly removed from hospital wards and patient bedsides and subjected to prolonged detention in Israeli prisons and military camps,” the joint statement said. “The conditions of many of those still detained remain unknown. Many of those released have reported severe abuse, while some have died in custody.”

Israeli forces have killed more than 1,500 Palestinian health care workers and 460 aid workers since October 2023, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The military has also detained at least 300 health workers in Gaza and 239 in the West Bank over the same time period,

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