ICSPR issues a fact sheet titled: “The ‘Unlawful Combatant’ as a Legal Cover for Targeting Medical Personnel”
Date: 27 June 2026
Press Release
In partnership with The Shaikh Group (TSG) and as part of the Youth Civil Society Activists Diploma Program
ICSPR issues a fact sheet titled: “The ‘Unlawful Combatant’ as a Legal Cover for Targeting Medical Personnel”
The International Commission to Support Palestinian People’s Rights (ICSPR), in partnership with The Shaikh Group (TSG), and as part of the Youth Civil Society Activists Diploma Program, has issued a fact sheet prepared by researcher Shireen Mohammad Sbeih titled: “The ‘Unlawful Combatant’ as a Legal Cover for Targeting Medical Personnel,” examining how the Israeli occupation authorities employ this vague legal classification to justify targeting doctors, nurses, and ambulance officers and depriving them of the legal protection guaranteed under the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols.
The paper explains that contemporary armed conflicts are witnessing a dangerous decline in respect for the rules of international humanitarian law, especially those concerning the protection of groups granted special immunity such as medical teams and health facilities, and that one of the gravest manifestations of this decline is the use of the term “unlawful combatant” as a political and military cover to legitimize direct attacks, arbitrary detention, and torture against medical personnel while they are performing their humanitarian duties.
The fact sheet indicates that following the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, this law was activated on an unprecedented scale, with thousands of Gazans, including dozens of medical personnel, detained in isolated military facilities such as the Sde Teiman base, in the absence of even the most basic fair trial guarantees and under conditions involving different forms of abuse and torture.
According to the numerical data cited in the paper up to early May 2024, more than 9,400 prisoners and detainees are being held continuously in Israeli prisons, including 87 female prisoners and 360 child detainees, mainly held in Megiddo and Ofer prisons, while the number of administrative detainees held without charge or trial has reached 3,376. The paper also documents that the number of detainees officially classified as “unlawful combatants” reached 1,283, while noting that this figure does not include all Gaza detainees held in absentia in Israeli military camps.
The paper further notes that the targeting of the health sector has taken on a systematic character, with 18 Palestinian doctors from the Gaza Strip currently detained inside prisons, some of them under administrative detention without any formal charge. It stresses that this reflects an abusive use of Israeli legislation designed to circumvent the absolute protection granted by international humanitarian law to medical personnel so long as they are performing humanitarian functions and are not directly participating in hostilities.
In its legal analysis, the fact sheet explains that the Israeli Knesset approved the “Unlawful Combatants Imprisonment Law” in March 2002, and that it was originally designed to circumvent a 2000 ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court, which prohibited the continued detention of individuals as “bargaining chips” when they did not pose a direct personal security threat. The paper explains that this law grants the occupation authorities exceptional powers, most notably open-ended detention for an indefinite period without a formal indictment, and reliance on “secret files” and evidence withheld from the detainee and their lawyer, thereby undermining fair trial guarantees and violating the foundations of international law.
The fact sheet emphasizes that Article 24 of the First Geneva Convention grants medical personnel full protection and neutrality, and that this protection can only be lost in exceptional circumstances and under strict conditions involving direct participation in hostile acts outside humanitarian duties, which does not apply to the detained Palestinian medical personnel. Accordingly, classifying doctors, nurses, and ambulance officers as “unlawful combatants” constitutes a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and turns legal texts into tools of repression and collective punishment.
Regarding the consequences of this classification, the paper states that medical personnel are subjected to systematic torture and physical and psychological abuse aimed at breaking the will of Gaza’s healthcare system. It also recounts a live testimony from a released doctor who reported being severely beaten and humiliated from the moment of his arrest inside the hospital until his transfer to detention centers داخل الأراضي المحتلة, under harsh detention conditions and torture that resulted in broken teeth, without ever being informed of any charge or reason for his arrest
The paper highlights that the forced removal of doctors, nurses, and ambulance officers from the field results in a severe inability to provide emergency medical services and save the lives of the wounded, thereby accelerating the total collapse of the healthcare system in the Gaza Strip. It also creates a terrifying and high-risk work environment in which medical personnel operate under a constant threat of arrest or physical liquidation, thereby undermining the capacity for humanitarian response during wartime.
The fact sheet concludes that the use of the term “unlawful combatant” against medical personnel represents a legal and political tool for circumventing the obligations of international humanitarian law and transforming the protection afforded to medical actors into total exposure under the false cover of “military necessity”. It further stresses that detaining doctors for indefinite periods based on secret allegations deprives them of the most basic standards of justice and turns detention into an instrument of collective punishment whose essence is the denial of medical care to civilians.
In light of the above, ICSPR recommends in this paper that the international community and the UN Security Council exert firm pressure on the occupying power to abolish the application of the “Unlawful Combatants Law” because of its clear contradiction with the spirit and substance of the four Geneva Conventions. It also calls for obliging the occupation authorities to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN human rights organizations to visit both secret and declared detention camps, especially Sde Teiman, and to review the legal and health conditions of doctors and detainees.
The paper also urges the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to include the targeting and detention of Palestinian medical personnel within ongoing investigations as war crimes and crimes against humanity, alongside the firm and immediate activation of UN Security Council Resolution 2286 to ensure the safety of medical facilities and staff and to provide them with the necessary field immunity.
ICSPR affirms that this fact sheet comes within the framework of its efforts to expose the legal frameworks employed by the occupation authorities to justify the targeting of protected groups, defend the legal and humanitarian immunity of medical personnel, and stress that protecting health workers is not a procedural or political matter, but rather a fundamental pillar for preserving the minimum threshold of humanity during armed conflict.
It should be noted that this fact sheet does not necessarily reflect the views of ICSPR or The Shaikh Group (TSG)
