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During Israel’s war on Gaza, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, was warned by Israeli soldiers for months in 2024 to take his family and leave his duties.
But Abu Safia refused to leave his patients behind, as his colleagues and family said in a documentary by Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines.
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Then in December as Israeli forces surrounded the hospital, an Israeli officer called Abu Safia and promised to relocate him and his staff to another hospital.
But the promise was a lie. Instead, the paediatrician and neonatologist was abducted by Israeli forces.
Ten months later, Abu Safia is still in detention as Israel has refused to include him in prisoner exchanges. His lawyer said he’s been subjected to torture and inhumane treatment, including long periods in solitary confinement.
Refusing to flee
Before his arrest, Abu Safia watched Israel’s war on Gaza unfold with increasing brutality.
During the earlier days of the war, Abu Safia would do his rounds daily and make videos, calling for international support and awareness over Israel’s war on his homeland.
Thousands of people were being killed, and Israel’s siege of Gaza meant that much-needed equipment and medicine were not getting in.
It became apparent that Israel’s war was not just against Hamas but against the Gaza Strip as a whole, including its medical infrastructure.
Despite increased attacks on healthcare workers, Abu Safia refused to abandon his patients, even after he went from doctor to patient when he was wounded in a drone strike on the hospital on November 25.
His family began to ask him if it might be better to leave Gaza altogether.
“He said: ‘If you want to travel, take the kids, but I’m going to stay here to work,’” his wife, Albina, said.
But she refused. “I said: ‘We need to stay together,’” she said of the “serious and dedicated” medical student she married about 30 years ago.
The two met in Kazakhstan in the 1990s when he was studying medicine there.
After the birth of their first son, Elias, Albina and Abu Safia moved back to Gaza in 1998 and lived in the Jabalia refugee camp. Over the coming years, Albina gave birth to three more sons and two daughters.
Elias was married in 2020 and had two children, and a few months before the war began, Albina and Abu Safia moved to a new house in Beit Lahiya.
But the war would upend their life and their family.
During the attack that wounded Abu Safia, his daughter was also wounded by a shard of glass that went into her neck.
His worst day, however, was when he lost his 20-year-old son Ibrahim.
“His whole life was still ahead of him,” Albina said.
“He wanted to become a doctor like his father. … He was registered to travel to Kazakhstan [where he was a citizen]. But that never happened.”
Ibrahim was out at the market when Kamal Adwan Hospital came under attack from quadcopters, Albina said. He told his mother he was at a house by the hospital and would come back when things calmed down.
An Israeli military operation on the hospital ensued and lasted about 30 hours. When it finished, Albina was told to come to the hospital’s reception area. It was the morning of October 25, 2024, and there were many deaths from the Israeli attacks. Among them, however, was one she hadn’t expected.
“I saw my husband crying,” she said. “I understood then that my son was killed. It was the hardest day of our lives, … for me, for my husband and for our children.”
Abduction
Abu Safia still refused to give up his work, even as Israeli attacks on Kamal Adwan intensified and the army surrounded the hospital, but when soldiers arrived at its doors, Abu Safia realised it was time to leave.
An Israeli army officer named Wael allegedly gave Abu Safia assurances that the hospital’s staff would be relocated to the Indonesian Hospital, also in northern Gaza, to continue their crucial work.
Abu Safia told his family, including his remaining five children, who were living in the hospital with him at that point, to pack and that the Israeli army had said it would relocate them.
“The very last time I saw him was when I got onto the bus with all my daughters and sons,” Albina said. “It was December 27 around sunset. We haven’t seen him since.”
Albina and her children found out the next day from other doctors that the Israelis came, interrogated and mistreated the hospital staff and took Abu Safia.
“He said: ‘I won’t get in the car until all the doctors leave and I am the last one,’” Albina recalled the hospital staff telling her.
Abu Safia was taken by the Israeli soldiers, who continued attacking the hospital until they withdrew a few weeks later in January. When they finally pulled out, the hospital was inoperable.
“We went to the hospital, and it was burned and destroyed,” Albina said.
“They bombed and burned the emergency room, and they bombed the intensive care unit,” she said.
Imprisoned
Since October 7, Israel has conducted arrests of thousands of Palestinians in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Many have been held without charge or trial and subjected to torture and abuse, according to released prisoners and human rights groups.
After he was arrested, Abu Safia was taken to the Sde Teiman military detention camp in Israel’s Negev desert, where claims of torture are prevalent, before being transferred to Ofer Prison.
In prison, Abu Safia’s fate would only worsen.
He was deprived of any visitors apart from his lawyer, Ghaid Kassem. Abu Safia was unable to receive his family, so when his mother died, it was Kassem who informed him of her death.
Kassem spoke to Fault Lines about her years of experience representing Palestinian prisoners in Israel, nearly all of whom have suffered torture or other inhumane treatment.
“I have covered almost all prisons in Israel,” Kassem told Al Jazeera.
“But of course, the experience after October 7 [2023] is the one that shocked us the most, and it is totally different from before October 7, in particular since we started to represent detainees from Gaza.”
Prisons in Israel have always been a dark place for Palestinians. But Kassem said the number of violations has skyrocketed since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7 two years ago and the start of the war on Gaza. Conditions have worsened to the point that many prisoners are contracting infections and skin diseases, she said.
“This huge number of violations, we had never encountered this many before,” she said.
Abu Safia himself endured torture and multiple beatings at Sde Teiman, Kassem said. He has also lost an alarming amount of weight.
“He has high blood pressure. He has tachycardia,” Kassem said. Tachycardia is an abnormal heartbeat.
“He is suffering from shrapnel [that is] still in his leg and his right thigh.”
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians and devastated the country’s medical infrastructure. Since a ceasefire came into effect on October 10, Israel has continued to launch attacks in Gaza and across the region.
As part of the ceasefire, Israel agreed to release about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of the remaining living Israeli captives held in Gaza and the bodies of the deceased. Thousands of Palestinians, however, remain in custody, and among them is Abu Safia.
His family still hopes he will be released soon. They maintain he’s done nothing wrong and Abu Safia has dedicated his life to serving patients in Gaza. They also hope that if released, his mental and physical capacity doesn’t mirror the damage Israel has caused to healthcare in the Gaza Strip.
“They destroyed healthcare in Gaza,” Albina said.
“They destroyed it. They killed all the doctors and killed many people. What they meant was to kill successful people and kill doctors in order not to allow them to [treat] people.”
