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Israeli doctor condemns the imprisonment of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, compares him to the Polish Jewish Holocaust hero Janusz Korczak
Yesterday I posted excerpts from an article for Haaretz written by Dr. Barry Danino, a senior physician at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, deploring the unjust imprisonment of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a paediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who refused to abandon his patients during an intensive siege of the hospital by the IDF from October to December 2024, and who has been held ever since without charge or trial, and subjected to what now appears to be life-threatening brutality.
It takes great bravery, in genocide-besotted Israel, to speak out, but Dr. Danino is not the only principled individual to refuse to say silent in the face of atrocities committed in his name.
Last month, Dr. Michal Feldon, a senior pediatrician at the Shamir Medical Center in Israel, also wrote an article for Haaretz calling for Dr. Abu Safiya’s release, following his appearance on a monitor in Israel’s Supreme Court, where a petition for his release, submitted by Physicians for Human Rights Israel. was being considered by the court, which, lamentably, ended up siding with the government in approving his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial for unspecified and classified security reasons.
Her article began as follows:
“My 10-year-old son saw a photograph earlier this week of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, taken in Nafha Prison and projected in the High Court of Justice chamber. Dr. Abu Safiya appeared emaciated, his forearms covered in cuts and his face expressionless.
“My son asked who the man was and why he looked that way. I tried my best to explain: ‘He is a pediatrician, like me, but he also managed a hospital in Gaza and saved thousands of lives through his work.’
“‘But why is he in prison?’ my son insisted. ‘He can't just be sitting there for no reason.’
“‘There is no reason’, I replied. ‘He is simply a doctor from Gaza. He didn't do anything wrong.’
“‘Okay’, my son said, ‘at least that won't happen to you.’
“I could have left him with that childlike hope, but it weighed on me, so I answered differently: ‘The moment humanity allows such things to happen in Gaza, they can happen here too. It's only by chance that he was born in Gaza and I was born in Israel.’”
As Dr. Feldon proceeded to explain:
“Dr. Abu Safiya's arrest photo from December 2024 is etched into the world's consciousness: a senior doctor and hospital director, dressed in a white coat, emerging last from the besieged and bombed hospital, only after all patients and staff had been evacuated. He walks through the ruins toward the tank that would take him into what has become, according to his lawyer, at least a year and a half of torture, starvation and humiliation.
“The world also knows his story.
“He received his medical training in Kazakhstan and married there, but chose to return to his home in Gaza.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, under Abu Safiya's management, came under repeated Israeli attacks from December 2023 onward. Abu Safiya refused to leave his patients despite his family's pleas, and his entire family moved into the hospital. In October 2024, he was arrested for several hours during a raid in which his son Ibrahim was killed in a drone strike near the hospital entrance.
“After his son's funeral on the hospital grounds, which was broadcast around the world, Abu Safiya began issuing frequent video updates from Kamal Adwan. He continued doing so until he was wounded in another strike on the facility a few weeks later.
“Six pieces of shrapnel struck his leg. Yet at the end of the surgery, which he also broadcast, he recorded another video about the hospital's condition from his intensive care unit room. Kamal Adwan remained the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza until Israeli forces took control of the facility in December 2024.
“Like thousands of other Gazans detained by Israel during the war, Dr. Abu Safiya is being held under the Unlawful Combatants Law without formal charges. His detention has been repeatedly extended, typically in six-month increments.”
Dr. Feldon proceeded to explain how the doctors from Gaza held in Israel’s prisons — of whom 14 are represented by PHRI, including Dr. Abu Safiya — are caught in a lawless carceral regime in which they “are forbidden from contacting their families” so that, “In many cases, relatives did not know for months that their loved ones were being held”, and are also subjected to routine forms of abuse.
“From testimonies gathered from released detainees”, she wrote, “we know of torture, including beatings, dog attacks, prolonged standing and constant shackling of hands and feet. We know of skin and respiratory diseases and inadequate medical care. Doctors have described lancing abscesses for fellow prisoners with whatever objects they could find, without disinfection. We know of starvation and insufficient access to water. We also know that three senior doctors died in prison under circumstances that remain unclear.”
In the conclusion of her article, Dr. Feldon noted how, at his court hearing on June 10, Dr. Abu Safiya conveyed just one message to the court through his lawyer: “I am a pediatrician who provides medical services and care to the sick, wounded and vulnerable people of Gaza. My detention here is unjust and arbitrary, and I demand my immediate release.”
As she proceeded to explain, “Almost everyone knows the story of Janusz Korczak, the [Polish Jewish] doctor who refused opportunities to save himself when the children of the orphanage he ran were deported to Treblinka [a notorious Nazi death camp]. He accompanied them to the camp [where everyone, including Korczak, were killed] and became one of the enduring symbols of heroism in the 20th century. Even my children asked to light a memorial candle for him on the last Holocaust Remembrance Day.”
She added, “Dr. Abu Safiya is the Janusz Korczak of our generation. He is tortured and starved in an Israeli prison, and his life may be in danger. If the High Court of Justice does not order his release, no Israeli court or authority will be able to avoid direct involvement in the annihilation of a Palestinian symbol of heroism.”
