A Palestinian doctor’s crime is refusing to abandon his patients
Dr. Mazen Al-Rantisi, known across Palestine as the ‘Doctor of the Poor’
Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 5 August 2026:
Dr. Mazen Rantisi’s West Bank clinic is full of houseplants and empty of patients. About 5 kilometers (3 miles) southwest of there, the 71-year-old family physician is being abused and tormented in Ofer Prison, an incarceration facility for Palestinian detainees.
The thought is unbearable. Perhaps as I write these lines, a masked Israel Prison Service guard is tying a blindfold over his eyes, cuffing his hands behind him with metal handcuffs and forcing him to bow his head toward the floor – then, amid a stream of curses, leading him to another wing or the courtyard. And if Dr. Rantisi tries to straighten up a little, the guard shoves his head back down, roughly.
It’s hard to imagine this man – often grinning, full of warmth, always ready to have a conversation – being led by faceless, nameless guards who, judging by their ages, could be his grandchildren. It’s hard to bear the thought that a short distance from his Ramallah clinic, where he was treating dozens of patients a day, Dr. Rantisi is spending his 47th day in detention, gaunt and weakened by the meager, rancid rations, the suffocating cell, the gnats, the damp and the mold – and with each passing day he grows thinner and weaker.
The prison service isn’t abusing him in particular – and I’m convinced Dr. Rantisi would be angry if people concluded from this column that he should get better treatment (meaning, not be abused) because he’s a doctor. The tormenting, the neglect and the intended hunger that Dr. Rantisi described to attorney Saja Misherqi Baransi, who visited him on behalf of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel, are now standard practice by the prison service toward all Palestinian detainees.
Conditions for criminal inmates, too, are worse than ever, the Public Defender’s Office has found in a report published on July 1. Any change in these standards is only for the worse: ever harsher tormenting and abuse – and an ever greater loss of human dignity – the human dignity of the abusers and of all who give them a green light and look away, who could halt the disgrace and don’t.
But this time I’m not writing about those who have lost their humanity – I’m writing about the human being.
In the early 2000s, I asked a friend, the mother of a 5-year-old, what she does when they fall ill. “I go to Dr. Mazen,” she replied, in a tone that said: of course we go to Dr. Mazen – who else? And I realized that not knowing who Dr. Mazen was marked a large gap in my education about Palestinian society. Over the years, I heard from other friends that they, too, go to him – with a stomachache, or dizziness, or because they woke up with a high fever. The visits involve no paperwork. You simply show up in his small waiting room, ask who’s last in line and wait. Best to bring a newspaper or a book. You don’t go to Dr. Mazen to save time, but because he’s known for his precise diagnoses, and because his care for every patient – and his smile – is an essential part of any healing.
Dr. Rantisi has no nurse or receptionist. Every patient gets the time they need – sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes 45. After each examination he walks the patient to the door, glances at those waiting, tosses out a friendly word and calls in the next in line. Most of my friends can spare the 20 shekels ($6) – the fee until about eight years ago – or the 30 shekels ($10) he charges today. But in certain stretches of economic paralysis and unemployment, some of them have had to calculate even that.
There’s always a dish of home-cooked food on his desk, or a bunch of mint. People come to him from the villages around Ramallah and from the city’s poorer neighborhoods who can’t afford to pay and insist on bringing him something instead. Every dish, potted plant or sprig of sage delights him. That’s why he can’t afford a car. “But it’s no problem,” he once told me. “Every taxi driver in Ramallah knows me.”
The principle he grew up on and made his own – that everyone is entitled to medical care – he puts into practice every single day. It’s also why he volunteers with the Union of Health Work Committees, one of the Palestinian nonprofits set up by left-wing Palestinian groups in the 1980s to support the population under occupation in the fields of health, agriculture, children’s rights and legal aid.
Israel targets several such organizations on a variety of pretexts, and the Union of Health Work Committees has been declared an unlawful association under a law dating to the British Mandate. The Union is legally registered with the Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry. Dr. Rantisi – elected chairman of its board several years ago – never abandoned his patients or the obligations that role carried. That is his crime. That is why he has been detained and tortured, now for a seventh week.
Perhaps as I write these very lines, a prison service unit is bursting into his cell and starting to beat the inmates. His nine cellmates, all younger than he is, close ranks around him to shield him. I picture Dr. Rantisi, weakened and gaunt as he is, examining them afterward. He has no salve or painkillers to offer, but I’m sure that even his handshake, or his faint embrace, brings relief.
Disclosure: The writer has a personal acquaintance with Dr. Rantisi and his wife.
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