A Doctor Vowed To Stand Against Israel’s War On Hospitals. Its Military Just Detained Him.
For the past 14 months, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya has faced Israel’s war on Gaza’s health care system head-on, documenting to the world his fight as a physician to treat patients and keep his hospital in the north afloat despite constant bombardment, depleted humanitarian aid, a painful shrapnel injury and the killing of his own son.
On Friday, the Israel Defense Forces arrested him.
After nearly three months of daily Israeli attacks, soldiers stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, killing dozens of people and detaining more than 240 others, including patients and medics. Captives were forced to strip and wait outside in winter temperatures before soldiers took them to Israeli prisons and interrogation centers, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
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Among them was Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and hospital director and Gaza’s lead physician for the U.S.-based medical aid group MedGlobal.
Kamal Adwan was the last functioning hospital in North Gaza, as Israel continues to wall the region off from the rest of the Palestinian territory and from any kind of outside humanitarian assistance. Still, despite the resulting lack of resources and the increasing casualties, Abu Safiya managed to keep the hospital in Beit Lahia at least partially running ― expanding its bed capacity from 120 to 200, and regularly posting updates online to show the world what Kamal Adwan, its patients and its staff were enduring at the hands of the Israeli military.
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“I think it’s important to have voices like him, because sometimes we’re buried by numbers ― you know, more than 1,000 medical professionals in Gaza were killed,” Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of MedGlobal, told HuffPost on Monday. “Numbers mean something to maybe people who follow statistics, but for an average person they need to know who are these people.”
“He was the face of the medical community in Gaza, and the face of being a doctor, a humanitarian, [a] compassionate person who cares about having ventilators to his patients, and incubators to his neonatal intensive care unit, and medicine to the patients who have chronic diseases,” Sahloul continued. “And he showed that day after day after day.”
IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said Saturday that Abu Safiya “is a suspect” in what he described as “potential involvement in terrorist activity,” though he did not offer details. In the nearly 15 months since the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, Israeli forces have attempted to justify harming doctors and patients and bombing medical facilities by claiming without evidence that Hamas militants operate in hospitals ― an accusation that, even if true, would still not allow such attacks in the eyes of international humanitarian law.
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“The IDF entered the hospital over the past year four times, and they interrogated [Abu Safiya] four times, and they searched every place in the hospital. So if there’s anything that could have been suspicious, they would have found it a long time ago,” Sahloul said. “So all of these talks about being [a] Hamas center and things like that is nonsense. No one believes these things anymore.”
Despite soldiers telling Abu Safiya that he was free to leave, the doctor reportedly refused to abandon his medical team at the hospital.
AFP via Getty Images
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“He took all of us and wanted to get us out at night, but they yelled at him and arrested him,” nurse Waleed Al-Boudi told Middle East Eye, adding that Abu Safiya was taken captive at Al-Fakhoura School.
Israeli army footage of the arrest shows what appears to be the last time Abu Safiya was seen before his detention, with soldiers shaking his hand, addressing him as “Doctor” and having him enter their tank with them. Abu Safiya, still wearing his white coat, can be seen telling the soldiers that there is no one left inside Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Sahloul said the IDF would not confirm Abu Safiya’s whereabouts with MedGlobal, but that family and eyewitnesses said he was in Ofer prison with dozens of fellow medical workers before getting transferred to the notoriously brutal Sde Teiman prison. HuffPost could not independently verify Abu Safiya’s location.
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Witnesses, some of them prisoners who have since been released, said the doctor showed signs of having undergone torture and beatings ― testimony that dovetails with previous extensive reporting on the conditions and inhumane treatment that prisoners, including health care workers, face at alleged torture camps like Sde Teiman.
“Today, while he is being forced to stay in the Israeli Sde Teiman detention camp, known for its brutality against the prisoners imprisoned there,” the doctor’s son, Idris Abu Safiya, said in a video Monday. “We have received testimonies from released detainees confirming he was subjected to humiliation and abuse, including forcing him to undress and using him as a human shield.”
“We call upon all international institutions and human rights organizations… and every person of living conscience and all doctors in the world to take urgent and immediate action to pressure the occupation authorities to release my father, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, before he meets the fate of many doctors and medical workers,” Idris Abu Safiya said.
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Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images
Groups like the World Health Organization, Amnesty International and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have demanded that Israeli forces release Abu Safiya from captivity and stop targeting Gaza’s hospitals and health care workers. Sahloul said that he and Abu Safiya’s family have asked U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President-elect Donald Trump to pressure the Israeli government to release the hospital director and his colleagues.
The State Department is “aware of reports and still gathering information,” a spokesperson told HuffPost on Monday, adding that claims of Hamas operating in hospitals present Israel with “an unusual burden” but that Israel should do more to curb civilian casualties. The agency did not say whether it would pressure Israel to release Abu Safiya.
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“As we have said before, we do not want to see firefights in hospitals where innocent people and patients receiving medical care are caught in the crossfire, and we have had active consultations with the Israeli Defense Forces on this,” the spokesperson said. “We call on all parties of the conflict to respect the protected status of these facilities and to avoid harm to civilians receiving treatment and humanitarian workers providing that care.”
HuffPost published a report in October detailing how the Israeli military is ensuring the long-term decimation of the Palestinian people by targeting Gaza’s health care system, preventing people from receiving treatment for the malnutrition and diseases that result from mass displacement and destroyed sanitation infrastructure. Amid the ongoing destruction, Abu Safiya had become one of the last doctors in northern Gaza and the voice of the territory’s medical community.
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“He told me one time that he will provide the same care to an injured Israeli soldier, similar to a Palestinian child who ended up in his hospital,” Sahloul said. “He is the essence of being a physician and humanitarian, and he deserves to have the Nobel Peace Prize. Not to be detained and injured.”
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