A leading Gaza doctor may die soon in an Israeli prison – his targeting has been deliberate
Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya had been beaten so savagely in Israeli prison that his own lawyer said he struggled to recognise him during a visit this week.
The prominent paediatrician used to run Kamal Adwan Hospital, which, for a while, was the last hospital standing in utterly razed northern Gaza. The Israeli military repeatedly raided and besieged the hospital – until finally, in December 2024, they ejected everyone and took Abu Safiya, 53, who has been held without charge ever since.
Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHR-I), which has monitored all these attacks, said he has been held without due process and subjected to abuse and solitary confinement. The Israelis claim he is linked to Hamas, but have produced no evidence.
Together with Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, they are now warning that he might die any day. They have urged that he and dozens of other Palestinian medics being held arbitrarily in Israeli prisons be released before it is too late.
His case is not isolated. In fact, United Nations experts have warned that the detention and torture of Gaza’s medics is part of the deliberate and ongoing destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system or “medicide”, and part of an ongoing genocide.
Abu Safiya is one of 56 healthcare workers from Gaza still being held in Israeli custody, all without charge, according to PHR-I.
In total, around 250 have been taken from Gaza since Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel started its obliteration of Gaza, which was home to more than 2 million people.
“The detention of doctors from Gaza cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. The continued detention of these doctors is not merely about the fate of individual physicians,” PHR-I’s Naji Abbas explains.
“It is part of the ongoing dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system, because a health system cannot be rebuilt while the people who sustained it remain imprisoned, disappeared, or dead.”
In August, UN experts said deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics, and hospitals, as well as the torture and detention of healthcare workers, was intended to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.
This, they added, was a “sinister component” of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
And so Dr Abu Safiya is an alarming and immediate case, which needs international attention.
He struggled to breathe and to sit upright without falling, and on “several occasions seemed on the verge of losing consciousness,” according his lawyer Odeh, who saw him on 2 July within Nitzan Prison.
Odeh said he bore fresh, severe injuries to his head, around his eyes, and on his ears and neck and seemed almost too frightened to speak. He also appeared briefly by video during that hearing, looking pale and gaunt, with marks on both arms.
