Photo: Israeli Occupying Forces raid (illustrative)
The Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC) and Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) have sent over fifty letters to States' Embassies, Representative Offices and Consulates General in Palestine. PHROC and PNGO call for urgent international intervention for the immediate release of 11 Palestinians who were arbitrarily arrested and detained in Israeli military raids on their homes across the West Bank, between 28 June and 1 July, for alleged membership of the Health Work Committees (HWCs). Some of the detained are elderly with serious health conditions.
The work of the HWC is crucial to Palestinian community development. HWC is a Palestinian non-governmental health and developmental organisation, which provides health services, builds “development models to all segments of the Palestinian population, particularly the poor and the marginalised,” and lobbies and advocates “in support of favourable policies and legislations for the realisation of [a] free democratic society and its citizens enjoying their social rights”.
For years, Israel has systematically targeted Palestinian civil society organisations to quash the viability of Palestinian life on both sides of the Green Line, in particular, dismantling organisations that develop Palestinian communities. Israel carries out arbitrary arrests and detentions of Palestinian human rights defenders, repeatedly extends administrative detentions, on secret evidence, with no due process, subjects detainees to inhumane and cruel treatment, destroys properties, designates and outlaws Palestinian civil society (CSOs), raids and seals Palestinian CSO offices, and bans humanitarian organisations, in repressive acts of settler colonial violence to entrench its apartheid regime, destroy the Palestinian group, and advance its unlawful settlement enterprise.
An Israeli military declaration titled “declaration of an illegitimate organisation”, dated 22 January 2020, declared HWC an “unlawful and illegitimate” organisation. Since then, Israel’s violent attacks against HWC have escalated. HWC explain that in the “last couple of years, the Israeli repression against the [HWCs] intensified. The headquarters of HWC, one of the most important health organisations in Palestine, were raided several times. Former director Shatha Odeh was arrested and locked up for more than 11 months” and other Palestinians were “arrested and jailed” for alleged HWC membership.
In August 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had the requisite mens rea for genocide, highlighting inter alia, “the concerted policy of Israel to systematically destroy healthcare facilities and its attacks against healthcare professionals, forcing Palestinians to live without access to crucial medical care.
Such attacks include, the torture and medical neglect of Dr. Hossam Abu Safia, arbitrarily arrested by the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) from Gaza in December 2024 and detained in solitary confinement without charge and trial. Dr Ahmed Muhanna, the director of Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza, described how Palestinian “doctors are treated with particular brutality while detained, prevented from helping other detainees, even those injured during violent interrogations.”
The UN Health Cluster has recorded 1,955 attacks on Palestinian healthcare workers across the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including the killing of 1,002 healthcare workers in Gaza, and 39 in the West Bank, since 7 October 2023. 317 health workers have been arrested or detained in Gaza, and 295 in the West Bank. By April 2026, six healthcare workers had died in Israeli detention.
PHROC and PNGO warn that arrests for alleged Health Work Committees membership is a further attempt by Israel to destroy the Palestinian health system and “prevent medical services from reaching the Palestinians public”. It is plain that Palestinian medical professionals are deliberately targeted because of their occupation.
These arrests also form part of Israel’s practice of repressing and silencing human rights defenders to exercise its domination over the Palestinian people and entrench its settler-colonial apartheid regime. Acts of persecution against individuals or organisations, such as the HWC, because they oppose apartheid, are an underlying act of the crime against humanity of apartheid. Where these acts are carried out with an intent to destroy the Palestinian group, they amount to genocide.
On 29 June 2026, a motion was presented before the British Parliament, expressing grave concerns over the arrests for alleged HWC membership. We welcome this initiative, and call on the United Kingdom and other Third States to take concrete measures that put effective pressure on Israel to release all Palestinians healthcare workers in its custody, cease its persecution of the Palestinian people, and protect Palestinian civil society.
PHROC and PNGO call on all States to urgently intervene by publicly and categorically denouncing the arrests. We further call for your physical attendance at the court proceedings to support and protect the detainees. We call on all States to take concrete actions to end Israel’s manifest abuse of its military and administrative authority as an illegal Occupying Power.