Dr Abu Safiya symbolised humanity in Gaza. Israel and the West are destroying it
The last known image of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya shows him walking in a white lab coat towards Israeli tanks
Jonathan Cook writes in Middle East Eye on 8 January 2025:
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
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Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble. It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps. After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
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Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist. By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.