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.”