Free Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh

By
Seraj Assi

Israel has no scruples about wantonly slaughtering health care providers like Gazan hospital director Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh. What kind of country declares war on health professionals?

Health care workers and allies rally in support of Palestinians and to demand the release of Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh and all Palestinian health care workers in Israeli jails in New York City on January 6, 2025. (Mostafa Bassim / Anadolu via Getty Images)

On December 27, Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was kidnapped by Israel Defense Forces during a raid on the besieged hospital. Abu Safiyeh had refused to leave the hospital, vowing to carry on his “humanitarian mission” to treat the wounded despite Israeli threats. Israeli soldiers then proceeded to abduct him.

The world witnessed Abu Safiyeh’s brutal abduction unfold in real time. The Israeli Channel 14 published horrifying footage of him moments before he was abducted by the IDF. In the last photos before his kidnapping, Abu Safiyeh is seen wearing his white lab coat, wading his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan Hospital toward two Israeli tanks, which kept aiming their gun barrels at him.

Abu Safiyeh’s saga has been unfolding for months. Footage dated October 26, 2024, showed him and his medical staff holding up hands during the Israeli invasion of the hospital. As I wrote in this magazine in October: “After Dr Abu Safiyeh refused to evacuate the hospital, Israeli soldiers killed his son Ibrahim. In a video shared by journalist Anas al-Sharif, Dr Abu Safiyeh, still in his medical coat, leads a heartbreaking farewell prayer for his son. Another video showed Ibrahim’s mother bidding her son farewell and weeping over his body.” On Tuesday, Abu Safiyeh’s mother died of a heart attack.

Abu Safiyeh has been the voice of Gaza’s decimated health sector. His abduction is the latest manifestation of Israel’s campaign to destroy the enclave’s health care system. Kamal Adwan was Gaza’s last surviving major medical facility. For months, Israeli forces have besieged the hospital, battered it with shells, drones, and bombs, and sniped and executed medics, patients, and sheltering families. IDF soldiers invaded the hospital and destroyed wards, operating rooms, and intensive care units.

The Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the hospital, forcing patients out of their beds, while allowing the seriously ill and women about to give birth fifteen minutes to unhook their drips, abandon their sickbeds, and make their way into the wrecked courtyard, before setting the hospital on fire. The wounded were left to die of their wounds, illnesses, or malnutrition, with some freezing to death from the cold, including children. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. Ambulances that attempted to collect the dead and wounded were blown up.

The IDF ordered the forced evacuation despite international and humanitarian pleas to spare the wounded. According to WHO officials: “Over 25 per cent of the 105,000 injured civilians now face life-changing injuries. At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients.”

The hospital itself no longer exists. It stands empty on its own ruins. Gaza’s hospitals, to cite a report by the UN Human Rights Office, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap.” As WHO officials have observed, “The health sector is being systematically dismantled.”  In the words of renowned UK doctor Ghassan Abu-Sitta, Gaza has become a “dystopian nightmare.”

Abu Safiyeh is not the first victim of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinian health professionals. Over the past fifteen months, Israel has killed, mass abducted, and tortured thousands of Palestinian medics. According to UN officials, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals have been killed so far.

Those who have survived have hardly fared better. Medical staff have been rounded up, stripped of their clothing, and disappeared. Under the pretext of seeking “terror suspects,” Israel has abducted over 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital, most of them patients and medical staff who are being held in horrifying conditions, which include torture, systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse, and gang rape.

Last April, Israeli forces kidnapped Dr Adnan al-Bursh, a leading surgeon from Gaza and the former head of orthopedics at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, who was tortured to death in the Ofer prison. Bursh was dumped by guards in the prison’s yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died shortly after.

In October 2023, two weeks into its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, instantly killing hundreds of displaced Palestinians, mostly children, who were taking shelter at the hospital. Last April, after a brutal two-week siege of Al-Shifa Hospital, Israeli troops carried out a horrific massacre of civilians in the hospital and the surrounding area, killing hundreds of Palestinians who were buried in mass graves.

Abu Safiyeh’s tragic saga comes after fifteen months of genocide, during which Israel has now slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinians and maimed at least 100,000 others. It has displaced and starved the entire Gaza population of two million. It has all but flattened the tiny besieged strip, leveling its urban landscape and erasing many of its hospitals, schools, mosques, and shelters.

To kill Palestinians in the dark, Israel has murdered at least 160 Gaza journalists and banned foreign reporters. It has massacred whole families, wiping out entire neighborhoods, carpet-bombing refugee camps, and burning displaced families in their tents. It has constantly blocked aid to the ravaged enclave, and expelled the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), thus hastening the collapse of social order in Gaza. Early this month, Israeli legislators called on the new defense minister, Israel Katz, to order the destruction of the last sources of water, food, and energy in northern Gaza.

Amid the silence of the Western political class and mainstream media, there is a growing global movement demanding that Israel free Dr Abu Safiyeh. Doctors and medical organizations around the world have demanded his immediate and unconditional release. Global health care vigils have been held outside hospitals, while hundreds of doctors and medics have taken to social media platforms to show solidarity.

UN experts have expressed horror at Abu Safiyeh’s unknown fate. The World Health Organization has repeatedly called on Israel to immediately release him. The UN special rapporteur has called for a global medical boycott of Israel, describing Abu Safiyeh’s saga as “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza. “Dr. Abu Safiyeh must be released immediately and unconditionally,” said Amnesty International in a statement.

Human rights groups believe Abu Safiyeh is being held in an Israeli torture center, where his life is now in danger. Some rights groups believe that Abu Safiyeh is being held in Israel’s most notorious torture camp, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught live on video last year raping a Palestinian captive with a baton until his insides ruptured.

“Sde Teiman is known for brutality and torture, we can’t imagine what our father is going through in that place and if he is well or not, warm or cold . . . hungry or in pain,” Abu Safiyeh’s family told CNN. (After days of denial, and following a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding Abu Safiyeh incommunicado.)

The US government is complicit in Israel’s atrocities and war crimes in Gaza. Early this month, barely one week after Abu Safiyeh’s brutal abduction, President Joe Biden authorized a further $8 billion in arms to Israel, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters. The Biden administration has even dropped its pretenses of calling on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza or of trying to rein in Israel’s crimes against humanity, thus undermining the whole legacy of international law to abet a genocide while betraying the US’s own professed democratic and humanitarian ideals.

As Fadi al-Atawneh, a Gaza eyewitness, relayed to Al Jazeera, “Over sixty days of relentless shelling — quadcopters, artillery, and targeted strikes on generators. Dr Hussam’s pleas went unanswered until the hospital was stormed and emptied. How does the world allow this to happen?” He added: “I feel we were all betrayed. I am deeply saddened by what happened to us and the fate of Dr Abu Safia. We’re left alone in the face of this aggression.”

Abu Safiyeh has risked his life so that Gaza may live. The doctor has dedicated his career to saving what’s left of Gaza. As Dr Zaher Sahloul, a colleague of Abu Safiyeh, told CNN on New Year’s Eve: “Dr Hussam deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, not being detained and tortured in a prison in Israel.”