On November 20, 2023, Israeli forces besieged the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, north Gaza. That evening, projectiles struck the second floor, killing at least 12 people and destroying the front entrance. Four days later, Israeli forces raided the facility, leaving it in ruins. The director-general of the Gaza Ministry of Health told Al Jazeera, “We are in shock and horrified at the scenes left by Israeli forces at the Indonesian Hospital.”
This was not the last time.
By December 2024, Israeli forces targeted dozens of Gaza medical facilities, including the Indonesian Hospital. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the World Health Organization reported 492 verifiable attacks on healthcare in Gaza, killing 492 people and injuring 933. By February 2024, every hospital in Gaza had been destroyed, damaged or out of service due to a lack of fuel. Only 17 of the 36 hospitals remained partially functional by early December 2024
This is not incidental to what CripJustice names and documents. It is the deliberate, systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that keeps disabled and injured people alive.
The doctors who stayed and were taken
When the bombs came and the siege worsened, several doctors remained. They had patients on ventilators, babies in intensive care, and those with severe injuries who couldn’t be transferred. They stayed because quitting meant the patients would die.
Dr. Medhat Asaad Mahmoud Abu Tabanja, 46, the chief of the Intensive Care Department at the Indonesian Hospital, was apprehended on November 26, 2023, three days after the initial raid. He has been in Israeli custody for 895 days, as of May 6, 2026. There have been no public charges filed. No trial date has been set.
He is one of dozens of Palestinian healthcare workers held by Israeli soldiers since October 2023. Health Workers Watch, which monitors arrested medical personnel, has identified a pattern of incarceration in connection with Israel’s operations against Gaza’s hospitals, which began the day after October 7 and intensifying during 2023 and 2024. Workers have been taken from emergency rooms, operating theatres, ambulances, and hospital corridors. Many have been transferred to Ofer Military Prison, where past prisoners have reported physical and psychological abuse, severe pain throughout the body as a result of torture and ill-treatment, and enforced disappearance, which means that their family and attorneys are unaware of their whereabouts.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last major medical facility in Northern Gaza, was detained on December 27, 2024, the same day Israeli forces stormed and burned it. One image of him circulating widely is standing alone in a white coat before advancing Israeli armored vehicles outside the ruins of his hospitals. That day was taken. UN experts have demanded his immediate release. Amnesty International has expressed grave concern about his treatment, citing a pattern of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees. He remained in detention for months
International law is unambiguous on this point. Medical personnel are clearly protected under international humanitarian law. Their detention for performing medical duties, regardless of who the patient is, is unlawful. As Palestinian Journalists noted in a statement about Dr. Abu Safiya, even if he had treated Israeli hostages taken on October 7, as Israel alleged, “international law protects doctors and grants them immunity when performing their humanitarian and medical duties, without discrimination between patients.”
This is a disability justice story
At CripJustice, we identify carceral systems wherever they appear. Hospitals are explicitly within our framework, not only when they confine people against their choice, but also when states use them as targets, destroy them as infrastructure, and imprison the people who work in them as a tool of collective punishment.
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system produces widespread disability and death. When the only dialysis center in northern Gaza is destroyed, individuals who require dialysis die. When premature babies in neonatal ICUs are cut off from power and fuel, they die. When doctors are arrested during surgeries, the patients on the operating table die. When ambulance drivers are arrested, injured people bleed out on the streets.
In March 2025, the UN inquiry ruled that Israel’s systematic destruction of reproductive healthcare facilities, along with the siege that prevented necessary medications from being distributed, constituted genocidal crimes aimed to prevent Palestinian births. Preventing births is also a form of disability justice violation, as it involves the forcible removal of an entire population’s bodily autonomy.
MSF noted that Israel has demonstrated a “complete disregard for the protection and safety of medical and humanitarian missions and their staff.” Over 1,000 healthcare professionals have been killed since October 2023. Over a hundred ambulances have been destroyed. As of late 2024, no hospital in Gaza was completely operational.
What accountability requires
The doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers currently detained at Ofer Prison and other Israeli military detention facilities are those who stayed when everyone else fled, performed surgery under bombardment, and kept premature infants alive during a siege, only to be seized for doing so. Dr. Medhat Abu Tabanja, the chief of intensive care at the Indonesian hospital, has been detained for 895 days. He has not been charged with any crimes that have been publicly announced. He hasn’t been tried. He is being kept because he worked in a hospital that Israeli forces chose to destroy, and his continued detention is the final step in erasing what he represented.
At CripJustice, we identify what systems do to individuals. The systematic targeting of hospitals, the arrest and torture of medical workers, and the purposeful destruction of the healthcare infrastructure on which handicapped and injured people rely for survival are not collateral consequences of war. . They are choices, made deliberately, carried out systematically, and documented in real time by the organizations whose job it is to bear witness.
Dr. Abu Tabanja should be released. All detained healthcare workers should be freed. Every destroyed hospital should be rebuilt. And those responsible for a doctor’s 895-day detention without charge while he continued to care for his patients should be held accountable.
/A satellite picture shows the damage around the Indonesian Hospital [File: Maxar Technologies via AFP]
Sources
Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital in ruins after Israeli raid — Al Jazeera, November 25, 2023
Attacks on health facilities during the Gaza war — Wikipedia
