Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya had been beaten so savagely in Israeli prison that his own lawyer said he struggled to recognise him during a visit this week.
The prominent paediatrician used to run Kamal Adwan Hospital, which, for a while, was the last hospital standing in utterly razed northern Gaza. The Israeli military repeatedly raided and besieged the hospital – until finally, in December 2024, they ejected everyone and took Abu Safiya, 53, who has been held without charge ever since.
Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHR-I), which has monitored all these attacks, said he has been held without due process and subjected to abuse and solitary confinement. The Israelis claim he is linked to Hamas, but have produced no evidence.
Together with Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, they are now warning that he might die any day. They have urged that he and dozens of other Palestinian medics being held arbitrarily in Israeli prisons be released before it is too late.
His case is not isolated. In fact, United Nations experts have warned that the detention and torture of Gaza’s medics is part of the deliberate and ongoing destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system or “medicide”, and part of an ongoing genocide.
Abu Safiya is one of 56 healthcare workers from Gaza still being held in Israeli custody, all without charge, according to PHR-I.
In total, around 250 have been taken from Gaza since Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel started its obliteration of Gaza, which was home to more than 2 million people.
“The detention of doctors from Gaza cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. The continued detention of these doctors is not merely about the fate of individual physicians,” PHR-I’s Naji Abbas explains.
“It is part of the ongoing dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system, because a health system cannot be rebuilt while the people who sustained it remain imprisoned, disappeared, or dead.”
In August, UN experts said deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics, and hospitals, as well as the torture and detention of healthcare workers, was intended to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.
This, they added, was a “sinister component” of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
And so Dr Abu Safiya is an alarming and immediate case, which needs international attention.
He struggled to breathe and to sit upright without falling, and on “several occasions seemed on the verge of losing consciousness,” according his lawyer Odeh, who saw him on 2 July within Nitzan Prison.
Odeh said he bore fresh, severe injuries to his head, around his eyes, and on his ears and neck and seemed almost too frightened to speak. He also appeared briefly by video during that hearing, looking pale and gaunt, with marks on both arms.
The fear is he will die. And again he won’t be the first.
Six Palestinian healthcare workers have already died in Israel detention since 2023, according to PHR-I. Among them was Dr Adnan al-Bursh, 50, a renowned Palestinian surgeon who died in Ofer prison in April 2024, having too been held without charge.
Unusually, Dr al-Bursh’s death was confirmed by the Israeli authorities, who claimed he had been held in the notorious Ofer prison for national security reasons and that an investigation was underway – although again no information has been released.
His widow, Yasmine, told me last year that she had been forced to piece together what happened from former cellmates: he had lost almost half his body weight and was reportedly kept handcuffed, sitting in a crouched position with his head on his knees. His body showed signs of serious abuse.
The Independent’s own investigation into the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons – which included interviews with whistleblowers, former detainees, forensic doctors as well as autopsy reports, sworn affidavits and the Israeli military’s own indictment against five of its guards, found evidence of torture, sexual assault and rape, and medical neglect, which in some instances resulted in death.
It also investigated the likely targeting of medics, with healthcare workers describing violent raids and bombings of hospitals, sieges, mass arrests, disappearances of personnel, and then in detention, torture, sexual violence, and deaths.
We also spoke to two former cellmates held with Abu Safiya at the notorious detention centre Sde Teiman, who also spoke of the abuse he was subjected to.
The Israeli military and prison service insist all personnel operate within the law, and that any instances of abuse are “exceptional.” In multiple statements to the Independent the military has denied abusing or targeting medics and accused Hamas militants of using hospitals in Gaza as bases, despite providing scant evidence for such a serious charge.
The military said Abu Safiya was being investigated on suspicion of cooperating with or working for the militants. Again what evidence?
Again staff, international aid groups, and renowned Israeli human rights organisations like PHR-I vehemently deny those claims. Again Abu Safiya has not been formally charged.
If you target the doctors, nurses, paramedics, hospitals and clinics – all protected under international law – you deal a double blow to the entire civilian population. You make the future even more dangerous and deadly.
UN experts and human rights workers, believe that is the point.
