Prisoners & Detainees
Israel detains Ramallah cancer surgeon Dima Barakat without announcing any charge
Image credit: The entrance of Ofer military prison — Wikimedia Commons · License
Original Reporting
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Israeli forces stormed the Ramallah home of Dr. Dima Muhammad Amin Barakat before dawn on Tuesday, searched and upturned the house, and took the 54-year-old surgeon away, witnesses in the al-Tira neighborhood told Palestinian outlets. The soldiers confirmed her identity, told her she was detained, and gave her family no reason.
By Wednesday, more than a day later, the army had still announced no charge and no legal basis for holding her. Witnesses said she was driven toward Ofer, the military prison and court complex between Ramallah and Jerusalem where the occupation processes most West Bank detainees.
The doctor the poor could reach#
Barakat is a gynecological and obstetric surgeon, one of the West Bank's few specialists in women's cancers. Alongside her own clinic she works at the Dunya Specialized Center for Women's Cancer in Ramallah — a center built, as its founders describe it, so that breast and gynecological cancer care reaches women of limited income who could never afford it privately.
That is the practice Israeli soldiers interrupted on Tuesday: a 54-year-old oncological surgeon whose working week runs between an operating theater and a subsidized clinic. Her patients — women in treatment, women awaiting surgery dates — now wait on a military system that has not said why it took their doctor or when it will give her back.
A same-day demand for her release#
The Palestinian NGO Network condemned the arrest within hours, the Raya Media Network and the Shafa news agency reported on Tuesday, calling it part of a systematic assault on medical staff and on humanitarian and community work in the occupied territories, and demanding her release.
The soldiers confirmed her identity, told her she was detained, and gave her family no reason.
Witness accounts from al-Tira, reported by Palestinian agencies, 18 August
Barakat was one of seven Palestinians, among them two children, whom Israeli forces detained in raids across the West Bank and Jerusalem that same night, the Palestinian Information Center reported.
The second doctor taken from the same streets#
Al-Tira has seen this before. On 21 June, Israeli border police raided the same neighborhood and took Dr. Mazen al-Rantisi, the 71-year-old physician Palestinians call the doctor of the poor for five decades of charging token fees or nothing at all.
Israel later charged al-Rantisi with chairing the board of the Union of Health Work Committees, a Palestinian medical NGO founded in the 1980s that Israeli authorities have outlawed as a terrorist organization — the entirety of the case against a physician of fifty years. From custody, al-Rantisi told his lawyers he faces abuse and medical neglect, Middle East Eye reported on 4 August.
The pattern reaches beyond Ramallah. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the Kamal Adwan Hospital director seized in Gaza in December 2024, spent more than a year in Israeli custody without charge, his lawyers and rights groups have documented, and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights says he reports torture and demands his immediate release.
This file stays open#
Times of Palestine will follow Dr. Barakat's case in both languages until it is resolved — every hearing, every extension, every statement by the army or by the institutions demanding her freedom. A surgeon held without announced charge is not a closed story; it is a running one, and this page anchors it.
Her patients' question is the file's first entry: who treats the women of Dunya while their surgeon sits in Ofer, and on what stated legal ground does she sit there at all.
