Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is one in all many unlawfully imprisoned medical professionals, reportedly tortured and abused in detention
As you learn this, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian physician from Gaza, is probably going nonetheless in Israeli detention – and, in accordance with mounting proof, being tortured.
Regardless of the latest hostage swap with Hamas, a number of well being professionals are nonetheless being held captive, with considerable experiences of mistreatment, neglect and torture. One in all these is Dr. Abu Safiya, arrested on December 27 and transferred to the infamous Sde Teyman jail camp (dubbed Israel’s model of Guantanamo Bay).
As every day passes, and with experiences from launched prisoners who attest Dr. Abu Safiya was being tortured whereas they had been in the identical jail, fears of his dying develop. Not less than three Palestinian docs kidnapped from Gaza have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.
Dr. Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was taken after the IDF had repeatedly attacked the hospital over the course of over three months, in the end invading it, burning and severely damaging important buildings, and detaining dozens of medical workers. By now the chilling scene of Dr. Abu Safiya strolling towards the Israeli tank has gone viral, as folks all over the world are demanding his launch.
In line with Medical Help for Palestinians, a British charity working in Palestine, when the IDF invaded his workplace, “an estimated 350 folks, together with sufferers, had been pressured to depart the hospital. Some sufferers arrived on the Indonesian Hospital, which was not in a position to present any care after being pressured out of service by the Israeli army on December 24. The final remaining partially operational hospital within the North Gaza Governorate, al-Awda Hospital, is on the point of collapse, struggling to operate amid relentless assaults and useful resource shortages.”
The non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor experiences that after abducting him, “the Israeli military subsequently transferred Dr. Abu Safiya to a area interrogation website within the Al-Fakhura space of Jabalia Refugee Camp, the place he was stripped and whipped with a thick wire generally used for road electrical wiring.”
The torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has been extensively reported. Strategies embrace electrical shocks to genitals, stress positions, psychological torture, near-starvation, and rape leading to critical inside injury.
Following a request by the non-profit group Physicians for People Rights-Israel (PHRI) for a authorized go to to Abu Safiya, the Israeli army claimed that it had “discovered no indication of the arrest or detention of the person in query.”
Nonetheless, one report cites Palestinians launched from Sde Teiman detention camp on December 29, 2024, saying Dr. Abu Safiya was being held there. One of many launched Palestinians stated the physician had given him the cellphone numbers of his sons, and requested that The Pink Cross and media look into his scenario.
On January 5, PHRI posted on X, “The Israeli army additionally continues to withhold details about Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s detention location, regardless of retracting their earlier declare that he isn’t being held in Israel.”
A extra recently-released detainee, Hazem Alwan, stated he had been kidnapped from Jabalia by the Israeli military and used as a human protect earlier than in the end being taken to an Israeli jail, the place he says he spent two days with Dr. Abu Safiya.
“It was clear, the brutal strategies of torture utilized by the occupation on him. Dr. Hussam is at risk, no person is taking care of him. His psychological state is totally shattered, utterly…”
In October 2024, when the Israeli military invaded Kamal Adwan Hospital, they killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s son, Ibrahim. However Dr. Safiya continued to work to assist injured Palestinians within the dire circumstances of northern Gaza.
In November 2024, he was injured in an Israeli quad-copter drone assault, believed to be, “an assassination try by Israel because of his unwavering dedication to offering medical care to sufferers in northern Gaza.”
He continued his updates from the besieged hospital, on December 6, 2024, noting, “The scenario inside and across the hospital is catastrophic. There are a lot of martyrs and wounded, together with 4 martyrs from the hospital’s medical workers, and there aren’t any surgeons left.”
He spoke of the sequence of Israeli airstrikes, simply outdoors the hospital, and of being pressured by Israeli troopers to evacuate all sufferers, displaced individuals and medical workers to the hospital yard and forcibly take them out to the checkpoint.
“Within the morning, we had been shocked to see a whole bunch of lifeless our bodies and wounded folks within the streets surrounding the hospital.”
On January 9, the Al Mezan Middle for Human Rights, an NGO based mostly within the Jabalis refugee camp in Palestine, famous that, “Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention was prolonged till February 13, 2025 by an Israeli Courtroom” and that his authorized counsel – which has been prevented from seeing him – will stay banned from visiting the physician till January 22.
Nonetheless one other physician, Dr. Akram Abu Ouda, head of Orthopedics on the Indonesian Hospital (additionally in northern Gaza) is lacking. Ramy Abdu (of Euro-Med) famous, “He has been detained by Israel for over a 12 months, and it’s our responsibility to remind the world he’s wrongfully imprisoned, struggling below torture, together with his well being deteriorating.”
Palestinian doctors tortured to death
In September 2024, UN Particular Rapporteur on the best to well being, Tlaleng Mofokeng, said, “Dr. Ziad Eldalou is the third physician confirmed to have died whereas being detained by Israel since October 7, 2023.”
Eldalou was, the OHCHR notes, an inside medication doctor at Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, detained with different healthcare staff by invading Israeli troopers on March 18, 2024, who died simply three days later, whereas in detention.
In its report on Dr. Abu Safiya, Euro-Med remembers the deaths of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedics division at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was “killed below torture at Ofer Detention Centre on April 19, 2024,” and Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics division at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was “killed because of torture at an Israeli Shin Guess interrogation heart in Ashkelon, one week after his detention in November 2023. Israeli authorities hid his dying for greater than seven months.”
Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was “doubtless raped to dying,” wrote United Nations Particular Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese.
These murders, and the imprisonment and torture of quite a few Palestinian docs from Gaza, and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinian well being and medical professionals, are a part of Israel’s systematic assault on each side of Gaza’s well being care system, in addition to on the Palestinians’ morale: seeing docs who didn’t abandon their sufferers be imprisoned, tortured and killed is a crushing blow.
Each Mofokeng and Albanese, firstly of January, 2025, issued an pressing warning: “We’re horrified and anxious by experiences from northern Gaza and particularly the assault on the healthcare staff together with the final remaining of twenty-two now-destroyed hospitals: Kamal Adwan Hospital.”
“We’re gravely involved with the destiny of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, one more physician to be harassed, kidnapped and arbitrarily detained by the occupation forces, in his case for defying evacuation orders to depart his sufferers and colleagues behind. That is a part of a sample by Israel to repeatedly bombard, destroy and totally annihilate the belief of the best to well being in Gaza.”
The ignorance on Dr. Abu Safiya’s well-being, the testimonies from launched abductees that he was being tortured, and the prohibition on him accessing his lawyer have heightened fears that he may die in Israeli detention.
This should not be allowed to occur. As Euro-Med said, rapid worldwide intervention is required for his launch. What’s much more tragic is that had been he being held by one of many West’s proclaimed ‘adversaries’, quite than its allies, such intervention wouldn’t be lengthy in coming.
The statements, views and opinions expressed on this column are solely these of the writer and don’t essentially signify these of RT.
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