Doctor Hussam Idris Abu Safiya shines as a quintessential political prisoner, whose liberation from Zionist prison is of the utmost importance and urgency. Dr. Abu Safiya is an exemplar of what it means to serve the people, doing so under impossible circumstances and at huge personal cost. His imprisonment and torture in Zionist hands is an affront to basic human decency and self-respect. The Zionist Entity must be smashed, that wicked colonial society must be utterly swept away if for no other reason than to free Dr. Abu Safiya before it is too late. The total absence of reporting on the arbitrary detention and torture of a respected pediatrician is a sign of the moral bankruptcy and complicity of U.S. legacy media.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, born in Jabaliya camp in 1973, is a pediatrician and neonatologist who served the Palestinian Ministry of Health as director of the children’s department of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, at the start of Al Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. The hospital was immediately on the front-lines of the Zionist war against Palestinian resistance forces and people, becoming the target of bombardment, sniper fire, and evacuation orders. During the early days of the genocide, Dr. Abu Safiya wrote,
“The Zionist government accused Palestinian armed resistance of using the hospital as a base, despite all evidence to the contrary, and Kamal Adwan was repeatedly raided. On 12 December 2023, after subjecting the hundreds inside Kamal Adwan Hospital to sniper-fire, aerial bombardment, and days of siege, Zionist soldiers stormed the premises and arrested the director, Dr. Al-Kahlot and members of his staff, evicted hundreds of displaced, and turned the hospital into a military barracks, where they proceeded to commit murders and atrocities against the remaining patients and locals, burying many alive in the courtyards.”
Kamal Adwan resumed operations under the directorship of Dr. Abu Safiya. Throughout 2024, the occupation army repeatedly ordered that the hospital be evacuated, but the heroic medical staff refused to abandon their patients, enduring bombardments and severe shortages of medical supplies, fuel, food, and clean water. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained in the north following the forced displacements of 2023, and Kamal Adwan Hospital remained one of a handful of sites offering medical care to the besieged populace. On October 25, 2024, Zionist forces brutally raided the hospital, detaining patients, medical workers, and the remaining surgical staff. His 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was killed by a drone in the entrance of the hospital. Despite this grievous loss and the inferno that surrounded him, the pediatrician remained at his post. In the weeks before his arrest and imprisonment, he was serving as one of only a handful of medical staff at Kamal Adwan Hospital desperately trying to save lives.
On 27 December 2024, Dr. Abu Safiya was arrested by the Zionist occupation forces who had returned to besiege the hospital. He has since been imprisoned without charge under the “Unlawful Combatants Law,” which the Zionist Entity uses to hold Palestinian civilians indefinitely. On 28 April 2026, his term in “administrative detention” was extended by court order of the occupation. Multiple reports indicate the doctor faces severe abuse and mistreatment. The last time Dr. Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, was able to see him on 2 July 2026 at Rakevet prison, he reported that the doctor was brought in shackled, covered in fresh bruises and torture marks, and on the verge of unconsciousness. During the visit, a visibly frightened Dr. Abu Safiya reportedly told Odeh, “This is the last time you’ll see me…They brought me here to kill me.”
Dr. Abu Safiya’s arbitrary imprisonment has received significant global coverage. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, and several other organizations have issued statements and launched campaigns for his release. Even the flagship British newspaper The Guardian and newspapers based in “Tel Aviv” like Haaretz have reported on Dr. Abu Safiya’s illegal imprisonment and torture. However, major U.S. media outlets, such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and MS Now have been silent regarding Dr. Abu Safiya’s terrible situation. The New York Times, which published the doctor’s desperate pleas for aid under the Opinion section in December, 2024, has not mentioned his name since January 2025.
The cowardice of U.S. legacy media serves to provide cover for the documented torture and sadistic abuse of Palestinian detainees going on in occupation prisons, avoids investigating the “Unlawful Combatants Law” and the use of “administrative detention” to arbitrarily imprison civilians, including doctors and medical staff who are protected by international law, and avoids drawing attention to the illegal and bloody dismantling of the Palestinian health system in Gaza by the Zionist Entity. Throughout the genocide, U.S. legacy media laundered the war crimes of the genocidal army with false balance, allowing them to override documented concerns from human rights organizations. Their complicity and moral bankruptcy only deepen with their self-censorship. The responsibility for organizing an effective campaign to release Dr. Abu Safiya again falls to the proletarian masses across the world. When asked what more needs to be done for his father, Ilyas Abu Safiya said, “Talking about my father in the media, news, gazettes and political pressure to liberate him. Raise his picture and talk about him.”
