As the Israeli military closed in on Kamal Adwan Hospital in recent weeks — the last remaining major health care facility in northern Gaza — Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remained inside to record the worsening situation.
In one video, Abu Safiya, the hospital’s director, showed an intensive care unit with blown out windows where he said shrapnel had shattered a nurse’s skull as he cared for a patient. In another, as bombs shook the building, Abu Safiya explained that Israel Defense Forces robots equipped with explosives were detonating around 50 meters from the hospital. Separate videos showed quadcopter drones dropping bombs atop nearby buildings as patients and staff looked on.
Last week, Israeli soldiers raided the hospital. One hundred and eighty medical workers and more than 75 patients and their relatives remained inside. Medical workers and patients reported that Israeli soldiers beat them and killed one doctor. Soldiers set fire to several parts of the hospital, Gaza health officials said. The hospital is currently nonfunctional.
Abu Safiya was among those arrested by the Israeli military. The last known images of him, first broadcast by Al Jazeera and since circulated widely online, show Abu Safiya, still dressed in his white doctor’s coat, walking amid heaps of rubble toward a pair of Israeli armored vehicles. He has since disappeared into the Israeli military’s secretive prison system, with no clear charges, a norm for Palestinian prisoners who are often held indefinitely by Israeli authorities.
Colleagues and family members have been scrambling to locate Abu Safiya and to secure his release. Abu Safiya’s arrest has drawn outcry from Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, political officials, and hundreds of physicians who launched a social media campaign to demand his release.
Abu Safiya has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s health system in the past year. His 15-year-old son Ibrahim was also killed in an Israeli drone strike in October in front of Kamal Adwan, where he had been sheltering with his family. Abu Safiya is one of hundreds of medical workers who have been detained by the Israeli military, most times without cause, throughout its genocidal war in Gaza.
According to his family and former prisoners, he is being held at Sde Teiman, a secretive Israeli military prison in the Negev Desert with a history of abuse, torture, and sexual assault. “He now suffers severe mistreatment in Sde Teiman detention center, including humiliation, exposure to freezing cold, and denial of medical care,” his family said in a statement.
Abu Safiya works for MedGlobal, a Chicago-based humanitarian organization that provides medical care in disaster and conflict zones, and is just one of six medical personnel with the organization who remain in Israeli custody, according to MedGlobal Executive Director Joseph Belliveau. Two other doctors, two cleaners, one data entry worker, and one nurse administrator — all arrested on October 26 at Kamal Adwan — remain in detention.
Belliveau said in recent days that MedGlobal has been working with the U.S. State Department, members of Congress, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Israeli government to secure the release of Abu Safiya and other MedGlobal staff.
Israeli officials have confirmed that the workers have been arrested, “but beyond that, absolute pin-dropping silence,” Belliveau said. “Where exactly are they? What are their conditions? What are they being accused of? How are they being treated? What comes next? What about due process here? Nothing.”
Another MedGlobal doctor disappeared into Israeli detention last month and emerged with a story of brutal treatment at the hands of his captors. On November 17, the IDF arrested one of Abu Safiya’s colleagues at Kamal Adwan Hospital at a nearby checkpoint. About one month later, the Israeli military released the doctor back into Gaza without explanation, Belliveau said. He declined to share the doctor’s name due to safety concerns.
“We could not even speak to him after several days after his release because he was so traumatized by what happened to him,” Belliveau said. During his imprisonment, the doctor was forced to live inside an outdoor “chicken coop,” and was exposed to cold weather. He was also denied food “and other means of demeaning and humiliating and brutal treatment,” Belliveau said.
“We still don’t have the full picture because of the state that he’s in,” he continued. “So that gives you a glimpse of the kind of treatment that our colleagues are experiencing when they’re imprisoned.”
The MedGlobal doctor was imprisoned at Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, which has its own history of abuse. In May, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, who was the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, died at Ofer. Human rights officials and family members suspect the orthopedic surgeon had died from torture at the hands of Israeli guards. At least three Palestinian doctors have been killed in Israeli prisons since the assault on Gaza, which numerous international rights groups and experts have declared to be a genocide, began last year.
At Sde Teiman where Abu Safiya is reportedly held, former prisoners and guards have shared accounts of torture, such as sexual assault, beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of medical care. Israeli soldiers who served as guards at the prison are currently facing charges for allegedly gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner.
Belliveau said attorneys and doctors with the International Committee of the Red Cross have not been allowed into the prison to treat Abu Safiya, which is required under international humanitarian law.
The Israeli military has said they suspected Abu Safiya of being a Hamas operative and claimed Hamas had been functioning out of the Kamal Adwan facility, but have failed to provide evidence to support either claim. The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment.
Belliveau, a former executive director of Doctors Without Borders Canada, defended his employees against such accusations, criticizing the Israeli military for failing to back their claims of Hamas involvement in medical facilities. He said organizations, such as MedGlobal, vet all of their employees in a process that includes input from the Israeli government, and praised the professionalism and resilience of those who have continued to work amid harsh conditions.
Throughout his 25 years of providing medical aid in conflict zones — which has included conflicts full of humanitarian law violations in Iraq, Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — the challenges he’s faced in Gaza to keep his employees safe from IDF attacks have been without precedent, Belliveau says.
MedGlobal is considering pursuing legal action against the Israeli military for its detainment of Abu Safiya and the organization’s other medical workers. Doctors Without Borders is also pursuing legal action within the Israeli legal system in an attempt to secure the release of one of its doctors, Mohammed Obeid, who was an orthopedic surgeon at Kamal Adwan before his arrest in October.
Israel’s recent ground invasion of northern Gaza has killed hundreds and forced the further displacement of thousands of Palestinians. Bombings and raids have crippled the area’s health care system as the wounded struggle to find adequate care. Throughout Gaza, many have struggled to find shelter amid winter conditions, the cold killing at least five infants. Humanitarian aid has been slow to enter northern Gaza, which continues to be subject to strict IDF blockades. The U.N. has warned that famine conditions are becoming more likely.
“These basic principles of international humanitarian law, where parties to conflict must take measures to protect medical spaces — and we’re seeing a complete obliteration of that principle and something more towards the total and utter annihilation of medical facilities,” Belliveau said. “It’s hard to even put words to it.”
