Shatha Abdulsamad
The New Arab / August 19, 2026
For decades, Israel has targeted not just Palestinian political actors, but the social institutions that sustain Palestinian life under occupation.
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.
Just days before Dr Rantisi’s arrest, another prominent Palestinian doctor, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, appeared before the Israeli Supreme Court after more than 530 days in detention with no charge or trial. Dr Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, became one of the most prominent voices documenting the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare sector during Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Even after his own son was killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting the hospital grounds, Dr Abu Safiya refused to abandon his patients and continued to operate the hospital under impossible conditions: relentless bombardment, siege, shortages of fuel and medicine and repeated attacks on medical facilities.
At the time of his abduction in December 2024, alongside other medical staff and patients, Kamal Adwan Hospital was one of the last barely functioning hospitals in northern Gaza. His detention represented not simply the incarceration of an individual physician, but the removal of a key social figure whose work sustained an entire community under genocide.
Dr Abu Safiya’s detention has itself been marked by persistent reports of physical and psychological torture, starvation, and the denial of adequate medical care. He has been subjected to repeated and severe abuse and torture, facing imminent risk to life in arbitrary detention.
What figures such as Dr Abu Safiya and Dr Rantisi embody is precisely the forms of collective responsibility, dignity, community-rooted care, and social endurance that Israel long perceived as threatening to its system of colonial domination.
The destruction of hospitals, clinics, charities, agricultural cooperatives, and relief organisations in Palestine is, therefore, not merely collateral damage. Rather, it reflects a deliberate strategy aimed at eroding the institutional foundations of Palestinian collective life itself.
Much of the international discussion around Israel’s destruction of Palestinian hospitals and civilian infrastructure in Gaza presents it as an unprecedented development in warfare.
Palestinians, however, recognise it as part of a much older strategy: the systematic erosion of every pillar of Palestinian social infrastructure, and every structure capable of sustaining Palestinian social autonomy and communal sumud (resistance) under colonial control and fragmentation.
Destroying the foundations of Palestinian collective life
Under decades of colonial control, military occupation, siege, and fragmentation, Palestinian civil society has functioned as more than a network of service providers. Popular committees, community clinics, relief committees, agricultural cooperatives, women’s groups, student movements, and local charities have historically formed the backbone of Palestinian collective survival.
These institutions emerged out of necessity to fill the gaps imposed by occupation and economic dependency. During the First Intifada, Palestinians developed extensive grassroots organising networks to sustain everyday life amid closures, curfews, and arrests.
Popular committees organised alternative education when schools and universities were shut down by military orders, distributed food and medicine during prolonged curfews, and developed local agriculture initiatives to reduce economic dependency on Israeli markets.
Community-based health committees became especially central during this period. At one point, grassroots health committees provided nearly 60% of all the healthcare and disability services across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
These committees represented far more than emergency relief structures and service providers. They embodied grassroots forms of collective organising, social autonomy, and Palestinian collective endurance that challenged Israel’s colonial apparatus by reducing Palestinian dependency on Israeli systems and asserting forms of communal self-organising.
It is precisely because these institutions generated capacities for autonomous social organising that they became systematically targeted. During the First Intifada, popular committees were thus raided, organisers detained, and many structures eventually banned outright in 1988. Israel recognised that Palestinian collective sumud itself posed a challenge to its system of domination.
Oslo and the NGO-isation of Palestinian civil society
The Oslo years did not end Israel’s targeting of Palestinian grassroots infrastructure but reshaped its terrain.
Following the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, international donor funding increasingly transformed large sectors of Palestinian civil society into professionalised NGOs, centred around development frameworks, humanitarian programming, and donor conditionality.
What had once been deeply rooted grassroots organising structures increasingly became institutionalised and depoliticised under the logic of NGO-isation. Within this framework, the language of liberation and collective mobilisation was gradually replaced by the language of development, capacity-building, empowerment, and donor conditionality.
While many Palestinian organisations continued vital political and social work under impossible conditions, the donor-driven funding environment nevertheless reshaped the terrain of Palestinian organising.
Increasing dependence on international aid structures often redirected energy away from mass-based mobilisation toward professionalised development models shaped by donor priorities, reporting mechanisms, and depoliticised humanitarian frameworks.
While this transformation unfolded within conditions produced by occupation, fragmentation, and economic dependency, it eventually altered the landscape of Palestinian organising. As a consequence, many of the locally rooted organising networks that had emerged during the Intifada years were gradually weakened.
Yet, even as large swathes of Palestinian civil society became absorbed into donor-driven frameworks, Israel continued targeting institutions capable of sustaining independent forms of Palestinian communal life.
One of the clearest examples is Israel’s long-running campaign against the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), one of Palestine’s largest agricultural development organisations. For decades, the UAWC has supported Palestinian farmers and rural communities through seed preservation, land rehabilitation, food sovereignty initiatives, and agricultural cooperatives aimed at protecting Palestinians farmers from dispossession and dependency.
In the Palestinian context, agriculture has never been merely economic. Control over land cultivation, seed preservation and food sovereignty is deeply tied to land, survival and resistance to settler colonial expansion and dispossession. For this reason, Palestinian agricultural institutions have long been treated by Israel as a threat.
This became particularly evident in Israel’s demolition of Palestine’s primary national seed bank facility in Hebron, managed by UAWC, in July of last year. The seed bank preserved indigenous Palestinian seeds essential for sustaining local agriculture under conditions of siege, settlement expansion and economic strangulation.
The destruction of the facility was not simply an attack on a building. It was an assault on Palestinian food sovereignty, ecological continuity and the very capacity of Palestinians to sustain independent life on their land.
Similarly, Israel has repeatedly targeted Palestinian healthcare organisations, including the Health Work Committees. Long before its unlawful designation as a “terrorist organisation” in October 2021 – and five other leading Palestinian civil society organisations – HWC offices had already been subjected to raids, closures, arrests and military harassment.
In January 2020, the Israeli occupation military issued a decree declaring HWC an “unlawful and illegitimate” organisation. Later that year, HWC director Shatha Odeh was detained for 11 months in an Israeli military prison as part of a broader crackdown against the organisation.
Most recently, Israeli occupation forces arrested Dr Jamila Abu Dahu, a healthcare expert, academic and researcher, for her affiliation with HWC. Although she was subsequently released, her detention further underscores that the campaign extends to individuals associated with one of Palestine’s largest community-based healthcare organisations.
The targeting of these organisations reflects a broader strategy aimed not only at controlling territory, but at dismantling the social infrastructure that makes Palestinian collective survival possible.
Gaza as the culmination of a long-standing strategy
What is unfolding in Gaza today therefore cannot be understood as an exceptional wartime breakdown. Rather, it represents the most extreme intensification of a long-standing strategy aimed at dismantling the institutional foundations through which Palestinian sustain collective existence.
The targeting of hospitals, agricultural networks, universities, charities, relief committees, and grassroots organisations reflects an effort not only to control Palestinian territory, but to fragment the social infrastructure that makes Palestinian continuity possible in the first place.
Under conditions of ethnic cleansing and erasure, these institutions have historically functioned as mechanisms of collective survival, political endurance and relative autonomy. Their destruction seeks to transform Palestinian society into an increasingly atomised and dependent society stripped of the institutional capacity to produce communal life.
Recent findings by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry reinforce this reality. The Commission documented systematic attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, ambulances and essential civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including attacks that devastated children’s access to healthcare and survival. Its findings situated the destruction of the health sector within a broader pattern aimed at dismantling the conditions necessary for civilian life itself.
Seen within this wider historical context, the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is not an aberration. It is the continuation and acceleration of a strategy Palestinians have long experienced across multiple sectors of social life: the targeting of the institutions that enable collective survival under colonial domination.
Yet despite decades of repression, Palestinian social organising continues to regenerate itself. Doctors continue treating patients under bombardment.
Farmers continue cultivating threatened land. Local committees continue organising food distribution, education and relief amid devastation.
It is precisely this persistence of Palestinian collective life, and the infrastructures that sustain it, that Israel has long sought to dismantle and has never fully succeeded in destroying.
Shatha Abdulsamad is a Palestinian researcher and policy analyst based in Berlin. She is a Policy Member at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network
