A prominent Palestinian doctor, Hussam Abu Safiya, is at risk of dying in an Israeli prison due to severe abuse and neglect. Abu Safiya, a 53-year-old paediatrician, was taken from Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza in December 2024 and has been held without charge ever since. His lawyer, Nasser Odeh, has warned that Abu Safiya’s condition is critical, and he may die any day.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) has also expressed concern, stating that Abu Safiya’s detention is part of a broader pattern of abuse and torture of Gaza’s medics. The Israeli military claims Abu Safiya is linked to Hamas, but no evidence has been produced. Abu Safiya is one of 56 healthcare workers from Gaza still being held in Israeli custody without charge.
Around 250 healthcare workers from Gaza have been taken into Israeli custody since Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. Six Palestinian healthcare workers have already died in Israel detention since 2023, including Dr Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned Palestinian surgeon who died in Ofer prison in April 2024. Dr al-Bursh’s death was confirmed by the Israeli authorities, who claimed he had been held for national security reasons, but no information has been released.
His widow, Yasmine, reported that he had lost almost half his body weight and was kept handcuffed, sitting in a crouched position with his head on his knees, and his body showed signs of serious abuse. 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.
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, 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. 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.
