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.
Among them was Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and hospital director and Gaza’s lead physician for the U.S.-based medical aid group MedGlobal.
Dr. Mohammed Braika Shares Update on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s Detention.
We urgently call for the immediate and unconditional release of Dr. Abu Safiya. pic.twitter.com/O56M6PhF8j
— MedGlobal (@MedGlobalOrg) December 30, 2024
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.
“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.
“The IDF entered the hospital over the past year four times, and they interrogated [Abu Safiya] four times,