“I felt genuinely happy for a few hours, from the depths of my heart, for the first time in two whole years,” said Maha Wafi.

On the night of October 12, Wafi and her five children could barely sleep. It had been an all-too-common problem in the two years of unrelenting Israeli attacks on Gaza since the October 7 attacks. But that night, it wasn’t the Israeli bombs keeping them awake.

Now, it was because they believed that the next day their husband and father, Anis al-Astal, would be one of thousands of Palestinians freed from Israeli prisons as part of the new ceasefire deal.

“What will he look like? What would we feed him, and what would we offer him to drink?”

“We were discussing what we should do when Baba comes. What will he look like? What would we feed him, and what would we offer him to drink?” she recounted to The Intercept. “I woke up early, and I was planning to go to the market and buy clothes and food for him. It’s just a matter of hours, God willing, after two years of detention, in a few hours he’ll be with us.”

She hadn’t seen her husband for nearly the entire war. On December 2, 2023, al-Astal, the director of ambulance services in southern Gaza, had been on a mission to evacuate patients from the north when he and three other colleagues were detained by Israeli forces at the Netzarim Junction, a major intersection in central Gaza. Since then, Wafi and her children have been waiting for him to return — and now the moment was finally here.

Or so she thought.

On October 13, when dozens of detained Palestinians were freed and brought back to Gaza, a call came from one of her husband’s colleagues: Al-Astal was nowhere to be seen.

“It was an indescribable feeling,” she said. “My sons are young, young men, and I have my only daughter, and we were bawling like little kids. My little boy, who is 7 years old, was crying his heart out. There are things that words and phrases can’t explain.”

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Al-Astal is one of at least 95 Palestinian medical workers, 80 of whom are from Gaza, still being held without charge in Israeli prisons, according to Healthcare Workers Watch, a group formed by Palestinian and international medical workers to track attacks on health care in Palestine. Among those who remain imprisoned is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, who was taken after a brutal attack on the hospital in December 2024.

According to Healthcare Workers Watch, more than 400 Palestinian medical workers have been detained by Israeli authorities since October 7, 2023.

“The majority of them have been taken from their place of work while working to try and save patients. So that includes people who’ve been taken from their ambulance, during their work, or from hospitals,” said Rebecca Inglis from Healthcare Workers Watch. “And so these are health care workers who are supposed to be specifically protected under international humanitarian law.”

Since October 7, the Israeli military has repeatedly attacked Gaza’s hospitals from the north to the south, and blocked medicine and crucial supplies. More than 1,700 health workers have been killed. The United Nations has described the attacks as the “targeted destruction” of the health care system — a “medicide.”

“These are health care workers who are supposed to be specifically protected under international humanitarian law.”

Palestinians from Gaza like Anis al-Astal have been held under Israel’s Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows for prisoners to be held without charge, for an unlimited time, and without access to an attorney for over two months. Amnesty International has said the law is being used to “arbitrarily round up Palestinian civilians from Gaza” with little or no accountability.

The indefinite detentions leave families in Gaza like Wafi’s to fight for any scrap of information about their loved ones. Some released detainees told Wafi that her husband had been moved between Israeli prisons, but she does not know with any certainty right now.

“He and the medical staff were about to be released,” she said. “What happened? What took place? Were they stopped? No one knows.”

A Doctor........

© The Intercept