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Healthcare workers and allies rally in support of Palestinians and to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and all Palestinian Healthcare workers in Israeli jails as they gather in New York, United States on January 6, 2025. [Mostafa Bassim – Anadolu Agency]
An Israeli human rights organization on Thursday warned of a “serious deterioration” in the health of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who has been in Israeli custody since Dec. 27, 2024, Anadolu reports.
Physicians for Human Rights said one of its lawyers recently visited Abu Safiya at Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and documented the conditions of his detention.
According to the group, Abu Safiya has lost nearly 25 kilograms, suffers from scabies without receiving proper treatment, and faces a severe decline in his overall health. He has not appeared before a judge since March, has not been interrogated, and remains unaware of the charges against him.
The organization said the doctor is subjected to violence, ill-treatment and denial of medical checkups despite a history of heart disease and high blood pressure. His detention conditions reportedly include food shortages, lack of clean clothing, and repeated assaults by prison guards.
The group noted that more than 100 medical workers from Gaza have been detained since Israel’s war on the enclave began in October 2023, most without formal charges, calling the practice “a blatant violation of international law.”
Naji Abbas, who heads the group’s prisoners’ department, urged Israel to release Abu Safiya and other detained health workers immediately, calling their detention a “moral and legal crime.” He appealed to the international community to intervene.
In February, Israeli media aired video footage showing Abu Safiya in custody, shackled hand and foot and appearing visibly exhausted. Days earlier, Israeli authorities had placed him under “unlawful combatant” status, amid reports of torture, abuse and medical neglect.
At the end of March, an Israeli court extended his detention for six months, according to a statement by the Hamas-run Office for Prisoners’ Affairs.
Abu Safiya has also suffered personal losses during the war. His son Ibrahim was killed when Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital on Oct. 26, 2024. A month later, he himself was injured in an Israeli strike on the hospital but refused to leave and continued treating patients.
He was eventually taken into custody on Dec. 27, 2024, when Israeli troops stormed the facility, forced him out at gunpoint and destroyed the hospital, leaving it out of service.
The Israeli army has killed more than 65,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children, in Gaza since October 2023. The relentless bombardment has rendered the enclave uninhabitable and led to starvation and the spread of diseases.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party Foreign Secretary David Lammy repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
More than 20 doctors are believed to remain inside detention facilities. Right, doctors being detained near Kamal Adwan hospital, including Dr Khalid Hamoudeh (left) and Dr Wadee Qasem (right). Composite: Guardian
At least 160 healthcare workers from Gaza, including more than 20 doctors, are believed to still be inside Israeli detention facilities as the World Health Organisation expressed deep concern about their wellbeing and safety.
…
A lawyer representing Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, whose detention by Israeli forces in December sparked international condemnation, recently said he had been allowed to visit Abu Safiya in detention in Ofer Prison in Ramallah for the first time and that he said he had been tortured, beaten and denied medical treatment.
The Guardian and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) have alsoheard detailed testimony from seven senior doctors who claimed they were taken from hospitals, ambulances and checkpoints in Gaza, illegally transferred across the border into Israeli-run prison facilities and subjected to months of torture, beatings, starvation and inhumane treatment before being released without charge.
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital, who was detained for seven months in Israeli prisons before being released without charge.
“I am talking about clubbing, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there … I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
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The head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya [QudsNen/X]
The Palestinian Ministry of Health has called for the immediate release of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, along with all detained medical personnel held in Israeli custody.
In an urgent appeal, the ministry urged international health and humanitarian organisations, as well as human rights institutions, to intervene and secure the release of Palestinian medics.
It highlighted the harsh conditions suffered by Abu Safiya and his colleagues in Israeli detention.
According to Wafa news agency, a lawyer from the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights visited him at Ofer Prison yesterday and reported that detainees are subjected to brutal and repressive treatment.
“During the visit, Dr. Abu Safiya detailed the various forms of torture and abuse to which he has been subjected both during his unlawful arrest and throughout his arbitrary detention by Israeli forces and authorities,” Al-Mezan said in a statement.
Highlighting what Abu Safiya was subjected to, his son, Ilyas, said: “My father was subjected to severe mistreatment and torture by the army in the early days of his arrest and was held in solitary confinement for 24 days. After that, he was transferred to Ofer Prison, Room 24, Section 2.”
Abu Safiya said that he has lost approximately 15 kilogrammes, suffers from an enlarged heart muscle and has been denied access to a specialist doctor or proper medical care despite repeated requests to the Israeli prison administration. His son added that he suffers from chronic high blood pressure and is only receiving minimal treatment.
“He is only provided with one meal a day, which is insufficient and of very poor quality,” Ilyas added.
The statement further revealed that upon his initial detention and transfer from Gaza, Abu Safiay was forced to strip, had his hands tied, and he was made to sit on sharp pebbles for nearly five hours.
He also suffered electric shocks and severe beatings to the chest while in Israeli custody, according to his testimony. He spent 25 days in detention at Ofer Prison, including ten days of continuous interrogation, during which he fainted due to suffocation.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health strongly condemned these repeated attacks on medical personnel, calling them grave violations of international law and the protective measures outlined in the Second Protocol of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It urged the international community to intervene immediately to secure the release of detained Palestinian healthcare workers.
Ilyas emphasised that there are no formal charges against Abu Safiya and that all accusations have been dismissed due to a lack of evidence. He expressed hope that his father could be released soon, calling for global pressure to ensure the freedom of all detained healthcare workers.
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Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
A reader holds up a copy of a satirical paper, “The New York War Crimes,” mocking The New York Times’ biased coverage of the Gaza genocide, on March 14, 2024 in New York City. (Photo: Nicki Kattoura/X)
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view.
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.
As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.
The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”
The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.
A group of activists gather in front of Sde Teiman prison in the Negev desert near the Gaza Strip, demanding the release of Palestinians arrested by Israeli forces in Gaza and the release of Palestinians who were arrested without charge, in Negev Desert, Israel on January 10, 2025. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli activists demonstrated on Friday to demand the release of Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya, who was arrested by their country’s army in the Gaza Strip two weeks ago and continues to be forcibly disappeared.
According to an Anadolu Agency correspondent, the demonstration occurred in front of the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in the south, organised by the Standing Together movement, consisting of Israeli activists who support peace, equality and social justice.
On 27 December, the Israeli army stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, setting it on fire and rendering it out of service. It arrested more than 350 people inside, including the hospital director, Abu Safiya.
At first, the Israeli army denied arresting Abu Safiya but later admitted to doing so; however, it continues to withhold any information about his place of detention, putting him in a state of forced disappearance.
Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations believe that the Israeli authorities are holding Abu Safiya in the Sde Teiman detention camp.
Sde Teiman is located inside a military base in the Negev desert and was established by the Israeli army immediately after launching the genocidal war on Gaza on 7 October, 2023. Many of those arrested in the Strip were transferred there, including children, youth and the elderly.
Human rights and media reports state that Israeli soldiers committed horrific human rights violations against detainees in this detention centre, subjecting them to various forms of torture and humiliation.
