Hardwood timber
Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today!
On June 10, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya appeared on a screen before Israel’s Supreme Court via video link. He looked gaunt, visibly emaciated, and his hands and feet were bound. It was one of the few times the public had seen the doctor since Israeli soldiers took him from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza nearly 18 months ago, where he had served as Director. He has been held without charge for over 500 days, with little known about his condition.
After the court hearing, Abu Safiya’s lawyer delivered a message from the doctor to the public: “I am a pediatrician, providing medical care to patients, the wounded, and the vulnerable in Gaza. I carried out my work in accordance with international law and humanitarian principles. My detention is unjust and arbitrary.”
According to the lawyer, Nasser Odeh, the court hearing followed an appeal filed by Abu Safiya’s legal team calling for his immediate release, after an earlier district court decision had renewed his detention on April 28, 2026. The Supreme Court came back with a rejection of Abu Safiya’s appeal. He remains in solitary confinement in Nafha Prison, to which he had been sent earlier in June as the date of his Supreme Court appearance drew near.
No formal indictment has been filed against Dr. Abu Safiya to date, as he is being held under Israel’s so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law,” according to Nasser Odeh. The law allows Israel to indefinitely detain Palestinians without having to file charges against them, subject to judicial review by the district court every six months. “Abu Safiya is one of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently being held in Israeli detention,” Odeh told Mondoweiss.
“If there were actual charges against them, or evidence supporting the allegations made by the Israeli prosecution, indictments would have been filed and evidence presented, as is the case with any other detainee.”
The lawyer added that Abu Safiya’s continued detention without the filing of formal charges demonstrates that his imprisonment is unjustified. To make it more difficult to challenge his detainment, Odeh said that Abu Safiya not only continues to be isolated from other detainees but is also cut off from his legal team, making it difficult to obtain verified information about his health condition. Despite the efforts to suppress information pertaining to Abu Safiya, Mondoweiss has obtained testimony from recently released Palestinian detainees who said they spent time with the doctor in prison before he was moved to solitary confinement. The ex-detainees, all of whom were released in March of this year, said that Abu Safiya was subjected to physical torture, beatings, humiliation, and degrading treatment. They also say that they spent their final days in prison with the doctor.
“We saw him weighing no more than forty kilograms,” Ahmad Qaddas, 34, alleged. Qaddas had been detained from the Jabaila refugee camp in Gaza in December 2025, and previously knew Abu Safiya as one of north Gaza’s most prominent doctors and public figures. Qaddas claimed that he had spent six days with Abu Safiya shortly before being released. “I could not believe my eyes when I saw Dr. Hussam,” Qaddas told Mondoweiss.
“His weight, his thinness, his health, his face, his hands, his feet, his entire body — I could not believe what I saw.”
Qaddas also claimed that Dr. Abu Safiya was minimally communicative, unable to respond to interactions. “He became so weak that he could barely speak,” Qaddas said. “He had to repeat each word he said at least four times before managing to pronounce it. Even when he ate, he vomited it back up. He always appeared exhausted and barely talked.”
Qaddas also said that the prisoners wore the standard gray prison uniform and appeared relatively clean, but that Abu Safiya “looked filthy” by contrast.
The testimonies from the detainees are the first details to emerge concerning Abu Safiya’s condition since reports of his torture first emerged in January 2025, a month after his arrest, as relayed by released prisoners who had been held at the notorious Sde Teiman torture camp with the doctor. Each of the prisoners said they spent a limited period of time with the doctor, although the details of when and where they were held remain unclear. “We had no way of distinguishing one day from another inside the prison,” Rami Abu Amira, 32, who said he spent six days with Abu Safiya, told Mondoweiss. “We spent days and hours shackled and blindfolded, with no sense of how much time had passed.”
Abu Amira was a resident of Jabalia refugee camp, where he was arrested during an invasion of his area in December 2024. He said detainees often relied on other prisoners to learn where they were being held. “When the opportunity arose, we would ask other detainees where we were.
Some would say Sde Teiman. Others would say we’re in Ofer, or another prison,” he recounted. “Those brief exchanges were the only way we could confirm that we were being held in a detention facility somewhere.”
Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, corroborated the substance of the prisoners’ testimonies based on his knowledge of the doctor’s condition, affirming that their descriptions of how he was treated fit with his conditions. All interviewed former detainees described the doctor being repeatedly subjected to beatings, torture, interrogation, shackling, and food deprivation — conditions which many Palestinian detainees report being subjected to across the board, but which in the case of Abu Safiya were allegedly applied even more harshly. They said that the doctor was clearly experiencing a deterioration in his health, and that they interacted with him as much as they were allowed to, even though any detainee who attempted to help him was allegedly beaten. Rami Abu Amira said that detainees, including Dr. Abu Safiya, were kept shackled by their hands and feet for an entire week, without their restraints being removed even for eating or using the bathroom.
Their restraints would only be removed for 10 minutes every 3 days to shower, before being shackled again. “Occasionally, our restraints would also be removed so we could eat,” Abu Amira added. Ahmad Qaddas emphasized that Abu Safiya “was constantly asking for medical treatment,” noting his advanced age. “Whenever he would ask for treatment, a doctor from the prison would come by and give him a single blood pressure pill.”
Nasser Odeh confirmed Qaddas’s testimony, asserting that Abu Safiya continues to suffer from chronic health conditions that have been exacerbated by his systematic abuse and mistreatment. The doctor’s lawyer said that Abu Safiya suffers from high blood pressure, for which he requires regular medication, as well as from other health issues affecting his back, eyes, and neck. One of the most serious concerns is what Odeh described as a policy of “deliberate medical neglect” by prison authorities, which has deprived Abu Safiya of access to essential medications and treatment.
“We previously submitted a legal petition to the prison authorities,” Odeh said. “We were requesting that the detention facility’s physician examine Dr. Abu Safiya and that his blood pressure medication be restored.”
Ahmad Qaddas also said that “soldiers would wrap him in a blanket and move him from one place to another, while soldiers placed their boots on his chest, and forced him to insult himself and call himself a donkey.”
“He would insult himself and cry as he did it,” Qaddas said, adding that the point was to humiliate him “in front of all the prisoners.”
The degrading treatment often crossed into torture and physical assault, the detainees added, alleging that they could hear Dr. Abu Safiya screaming while he was being interrogated nearby. “When we heard his screams, we first feared for ourselves,” Qaddas recounted. “Then we grieved for what Dr.
Hussam Abu Safiya was enduring.”
Beatings, Dog Attacks, and Food Deprivation
Rami Abu Amira alleged that he witnessed some of these moments firsthand when Israeli soldiers moved the doctor from the prison section to interrogation, or when they returned him to his cell. “Dr. Abu Safiya was tortured. They stripped his clothes, dragged him across the ground, slammed him into walls, and attacked him with dogs,” he said. At other times, he added, he would only hear the doctor’s screams, but would later see him after the interrogation session when prisoners were released from their cells for brief periods of yard time. Abu Amira also said that he witnessed soldiers raiding Abu Safiya’s cell at night as he slept, waking him up by throwing stun grenades beneath the bunk bed before storming his cell and taking him away.
He would disappear for a day before being returned at night, or the following day, Abu Amira recounted. Ahmad Qaddas said that Israeli soldiers would regularly unleash dogs on him to attack and pin him to the ground. “At that moment, he would cry like a child from fear and exhaustion,” Qaddas said, adding that the dogs would claw at him with their paws and nails. He described how Abu Safiya would sit for long hours in prison, unable to speak to anyone because he had neither the energy nor the ability to talk. “When we spoke to him, he could not answer, and we ourselves would be tortured for approaching him,” Qaddas said. These ranged from beatings, having dogs set on them, being denied food, or being sent to solitary confinement, he detailed. “I wanted to help him and serve him in whatever he needed, but we could not.
We feared being tortured ourselves.”
He explained that when prisoners were transferred from one place to another while shackled by their hands and feet, soldiers would beat prisoners on their legs, causing them to fall onto their knees. But with Abu Safiya, Qaddas said he saw the doctor totally collapse when hit, bumping his head on the ground from the fall.
“He was that weak,” Qaddas explained. “But despite that, the soldiers kept beating him without mercy.”
He noted that although he himself was a man in his thirties, when he was beaten, he felt that he might die from the severity of the abuse, while “Dr. Hussam was an older man suffering from illness.”
“Now, when I remember what happened before my eyes in prison, I feel like crying from the cruelty of the scenes I witnessed and the torture inflicted on the doctor,” Qaddas said. Breaking a Symbol
The picture the ex-detainees paint is one in which every moment of Abu Safiya’s life in prison is geared toward torture and degrading treatment. “They singled him out for torture and humiliation more than the other prisoners,” Qaddas noted. According to the ex-detainees’ testimonies, doctors were the most tortured prisoners in the facility.
For Qaddas, this was because the Israeli army intended to “break their convictions,” explaining how doctors in Gaza had repeatedly been a thorn in the side of Israeli ground invasions by refusing the army’s evacuation orders throughout the war. Healthcare workers — and the health and community infrastructure they represented — became synonymous with the refusal to comply with Israeli expulsion orders. During the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza in late 2024, Abu Safiya refused to evacuate Kamal Adwan Hospital, turning the medical compound into a last refuge of civilians and becoming a symbol of north Gaza’s defiance of the Israeli army’s invasion. Abu Safiya quickly became the face of that steadfastness, even in how he surrendered to the army, walking toward two armored tanks with nothing but his white coat amid the rubble. During an earlier invasion of northern Gaza in late 2023, Dr.
Adnan al-Bursh of al-Awda Hospital played a similar role. He was arrested on December 19, 2023, alongside other doctors and displaced civilians. Later, his death was announced in Ofer Prison in mid-April 2024.
According to testimony obtained by Sky News via the Israeli rights group HaMoked, al-Bursh died shortly after being brought into Section 23 of Ofer Prison, outside Ramallah. The prison guards had reportedly brought al-Bursh into the section “in a deplorable state,” with “injuries around his body,” which was naked from the waist down.
“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there,” one source told Sky News, adding that one of the prisoners helped him afterward and took him to one of the rooms, where he died shortly thereafter. To this day, Dr.
Al-Bursh’s body remains withheld by Israeli authorities. He stands as an example of the severe torture endured by Palestinian doctors who refused to abandon their posts and leave their patients to their fate, choosing instead to carry out their duties until they were arrested or killed. Abu Safiya’s fellow prisoners fear he is on the same trajectory. “We heard doctors inside the prison repeatedly wishing for death because of the torture they endured,” Qaddas said. “If there isn’t an urgent intervention to save Dr. Hussam, he will inevitably die inside the prison.”
Media that fights fascism
Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump.
We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.
Read More