The logic of erasure: Israel’s long war on Palestinian civil infrastructure
Shatha Abdulsamad writes in The New Arab on 19 August, 2026:
Israel’s destruction of Palestinian civil infrastructure is not an accidental byproduct of its colonial violence, nor a recent military development. It is part of a long-standing strategy aimed at dismantling the social, institutional, and communal foundations that sustain Palestinian collective life and survival under colonial domination.
On 21 June, Israeli occupation forces arbitrarily detained Palestinian physician Dr Mazen Al-Rantisi from his home in Ramallah. Known across the West Bank as the “doctor of the poor”, he treated low-income patients, regardless of their ability to pay.
His arrest, however, did not occur in isolation. Rather, it reflects a broader Israeli strategy that has, for decades, targeted not only Palestinian political actors, but also the social institutions that sustain Palestinian society under colonial rule.
Dr Rantisi represents far more than a medical professional. As the head of the Health Work Committees (HWC), a Palestinian non-profit founded in 1985 that operated clinics serving thousands of patients each year, particularly in rural communities with limited access to healthcare, he embodies a model of grassroots care rooted in collective responsibility and social solidarity.
Since his arrest, reports have raised further concerns over Dr Rantisi’s treatment in Israeli detention. He has been subjected to torture and denied access to adequate medical care, including the medication he requires. His treatment underscores the broader pattern in which Palestinian medical professionals are not only removed from the communities they serve but subjected to conditions that place their own health and lives at risk.
His arrest comes against the backdrop of an unprecedented deterioration in healthcare conditions in the occupied West Bank. Intensifying Israeli military violence, settler terror, mounting movement restrictions, economic strangulation, and an unprecedented shortage of medicine and essential medical supplies in the West Bank are steadily pushing the Palestinian healthcare system towards collapse.
Yet these conditions cannot be understood separately from Israel’s broader assault on Palestinian civil infrastructure across all sectors of life. In the Palestinian context, civil infrastructure extends beyond roads, utilities, and physical buildings.
It encompasses the social institutions that sustain and preserve communal life under settler colonial and dispossession: hospitals, agricultural cooperatives, relief committees, universities, charities, grassroots health networks, and community organisations. These structures do not merely provide services. They enable Palestinians to maintain forms of collective life, social continuity, and relative autonomy under colonial domination.