Senior Israeli doctor: we gave better medical care to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann than to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya

In a powerful article for Haaretz, “As a Senior Israeli Doctor, Our Silence on Hussam Abu Safiya Is Insufferable”, Dr. Barry Danino, a senior physician at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital), responded to a recent Haaretz article about the deplorable conditions in which Dr. Abu Safiya is held, which, he wrote, “should disturb every Israeli citizen, regardless of their political stance.”

As he explained, “Abu Safiya is being held as an ‘illegal combatant’ [actually, an ‘unlawful combatant’] — a legal category that permits the state to hold a person over time without trial and under conditions different from those prevailing for other prisoners. One can argue about the necessity of such a status. One can also argue that there's a security justification for Abu Safiya's detention. But there's no justification for someone to lose their right to basic medical care.”

He added, “The right to health isn't a reward for good behavior, and isn't revoked based on a patient's identity. It's one of the fundamental rights of every human being, whoever they may be. A country that really wishes to see itself as a liberal democracy is obligated to such a principle, because it's actually put to the test in the most difficult cases — not against those who engender a sense of identification with them but against those who engender anger, fear or hatred.”

In a crucial passage, he stated, “Even those who have committed the most horrible crimes are entitled to medical treatment. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann received medical treatment when he was imprisoned in Israel — not out of mercy, but because the medical and moral obligation isn't dependent upon who the patient is. In Eichmann's case, it was an expression of the system's strength, not its weakness.”

As he added, “More than 20 years ago, I took an oath as a doctor in Israel to stand by the sick ‘whether they're a convert, whether they're a non-Jew, whether they're a citizen, whether despicable and whether respected.’ That oath doesn't distinguish based on religion or national origin, whether enemy or friend, whether innocent or accused of the most serious crimes. It requires that we, above all, see a person requiring treatment. As a result, the silence of the medical community in Israel is insufferable.”

Dr. Danino called on the Israeli Medical Association to demand that the Israel Prison Service “allow Abu Safiya to be examined by an independent physician or to transfer him to a civilian hospital for treatment”, adding, “That's not a political stance; it's a medical stance. It's also a moral stance. Our attitude toward a helpless individual who is in the custody of the state doesn't reflect upon him; it reflects on us. If we let him die when we had the capacity to prevent that, we can't claim that we were only defending the country's security. We would also have to explain how we decided to forgo — in silence — one of the most basic principles of medicine and of the society that we seek to be.”

The article is powerful not just for its compelling contrast between the treatment of Eichmann, and the treatment of Dr. Abu Safiya, and, by extension, all the other doctors and medical staff from Gaza (75 in total) who are currently held without charge or trial in Israel’s prisons, but also because of what it says about the obligations of medical practitioners.

In the cases of the doctors from Gaza, the Israeli authorities are seeking to justify their imprisonment based on insinuations that they were somehow militarily involved with Hamas. If they have evidence to justify their insinuations, they should formally charge and try these individuals, rather than holding them endlessly without charge or trial as “unlawful combatants” under the much-criticised law passed in 2002, at the same time that, in the US, George W. Bush was obligingly designating the men and boys rounded up, on a largely arbitrary basis, and sent to Guantánamo, as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

The problems with Israel’s current behavior are, firstly, that it has consistently and cynically sought to erase the distinction between Hamas as the civilian government of Gaza, and its military wing. Working for the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t make doctors a legitimate target, just as it didn’t in the cases of journalists working for media organizations that were affiliated with the Hamas government.

Israel may well have suspicions that some doctors in Gaza operated on wounded Palestinian militants and/or operated on Israeli hostages seized on October 7, but neither of these scenarios justifies them being described as facilitators of, or complicit in any kind of military activity or even “terrorism.”

As Dr. Danino made clear, a doctor’s oath to stand by the sick “doesn't distinguish based on religion or national origin, whether enemy or friend, whether innocent or accused of the most serious crimes. It requires that we, above all, see a person requiring treatment.”

In losing sight of that, as with all of its actions over the last 33 months, Israel has abandoned even the vaguest pretence of occupying any kind of moral high ground, and has sunk, instead, into sickening depths of depravity, and devious and unjustifiable efforts to distort the truth.