Release Dr Hussam Abu Safia immediately
It’s been more than 1,000 days of genocide and 500 days of Abu Safia’s detention. We need urgent action to end both. Dr Hussam Abu
It’s been more than 1,000 days of genocide and 500 days of Abu Safia’s detention. We need urgent action to end both. Dr Hussam Abu Safia’s life is in imminent danger. This is what his lawyer Nasser Odeh said after visiting him on Thursday in an underground interrogation facility, part of Israel’s Nitzan Prison. If we do not act immediately, Gaza may lose yet another brilliant doctor, and Israel may get away with yet another brutal crime. Abu Safia, a Palestinian paediatrician and hospital director, first captured the global spotlight on December 27, 2024. That day footage surfaced of him wearing a white doctor’s coat and walking through the bombed-out rubble of what was once a northern Gaza street towards an armoured vehicle where Israeli soldiers were waiting for him. He was not surrendering an army; he was surrendering the small but critical Kamal Adwan Hospital after 85 days of siege as his staff and patients were forced to leave at gunpoint. A hospital that should have been protected by international law, international leaders and the United Nations but instead was attacked, deprived of medicine, electricity and supplies. At least 30 people were killed and 20 injured in the hospital when Israeli troops stormed it on December 6, 2024. When his teenage son Ibrahim was killed outside the hospital, Abu Safia said the funeral prayers himself before rushing back to his child patients. The photo and video of Abu Safia’s last moments of freedom were shared globally on social media, capturing the attention of millions and demonstrating the limits of social media activism. The global spotlight didn’t change his or Gaza’s fate or the politics of the rogue state of Israel. Abu Safia is not a “terrorist” nor a “combatant”. If anything, he is the defender of life who stands by his patients: Palestinian children under Israeli occupation, targets of bombing, sniper fire and the sadistic Israeli siege causing widespread starvation, thirst, disease and premature death among them.
Israel claims Abu Safia is “affiliated with Hamas” and has detained him under the Unlawful Combatants Law. No evidence has been presented to prove these allegations, no criminal indictment has been brought, and no independent observer has been able to examine the intelligence said to justify his detention. On June 10, Abu Safia was finally seen in public after more than 500 days of brutal imprisonment. He appeared via videolink from the dreaded Nafha Prison during an Israeli Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem. He was handcuffed and shackled, looked emaciated and unwell, but he had a calm and dignified posture. Less than a month later, his lawyer visited him in Nitzan Prison. He had trouble recognising his client because he was so badly beaten and was losing consciousness during the meeting. Abu Safia is one of hundreds of Palestinian medical workers whom Israel has detained. Fourteen doctors, including him, remain in Israeli detention camps and prisons. Two have not made it out alive, and 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed. Why are Palestinian medics and hospital staff arrested, detained, tortured and killed by Israel? For decades, Israeli occupation forces have been targeting Palestinian healthcare, in violation of international law, to promote ethnic cleansing and collective punishment as part of their settler-colonial project. The Israeli epistemicide aims to erase all signs of Palestinian knowledge, infrastructure and civil society. To cover up their crimes, the Israeli military has claimed that Gaza’s hospitals are military hideouts or “command centres” for the Palestinian armed resistance. To date, they have not been able to produce independent, verifiable proof of this. I have myself worked in various hospitals in Gaza for 25 years, mostly at al-Shifa in Gaza City, and never ever seen any proof of such use of either hospitals or ambulances. The arrest, abuse and torture of Palestinian medics and other staff from Gaza’s hospitals aim to force false confessions of such use of hospitals in Gaza.
The BriefWire