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Free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya
A perspective from Chris Mayfield
News of Gaza has largely faded from major US media, but unfortunately not because things have gotten better in the besieged territory. Gaza has been turned essentially into a sea of rubble. Babies are dying of hypothermia as well as malnutrition, as families struggle for survival in flimsy homemade tents under cold winter rain. Disease is rampant. Very little societal infrastructure remains, which genocide scholars have pointed out is part of the strategy to make a territory uninhabitable..
Americans often feel powerless, as our government continues to fund what is now internationally recognized as Israeli genocide. We can at least continue to speak out. As Congress begins its 2025 sessions, I am asking Senators Tillis and Budd, and Representative Valerie Foushee to act on two specific matters: i’m asking that they vote against the $8 billion in additional arms sales to Israel that Biden has just promised, and that they pressure the Israeli government to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and the rest of the medical staff they have detained from Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Dr. Abu Safiya is a pediatrician who was also the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, until recently the major hospital in the besieged northern sector of the strip. During the months-long Israeli siege of his hospital, Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff refused to abandon their patients, including badly wounded adults and children and a ward of premature babies on oxygen. With minimal supplies and under repeated artillery attacks, they continued their work. Dr. Abu Safiya made several videos documenting the dire conditions and pleading for an end to the attacks and for recognition of the huge humanitarian rights violations that were taking place.
Dr. Abu Safiya’s own teenage son was killed in a drone attack on the hospital grounds, and Dr. Abu Safiya himself was seriously wounded. Many other medical staff were either killed or wounded. Nevertheless, they continued to care for their patients as best they could.
On December 27, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ordered everyone in the hospital to leave, giving the staff about 15 minutes to move patients into the courtyard where many displaced families were already attempting to shelter. At that point, according to Dr. Abu Safiya’s colleagues, a large number of staff were stripped to their underwear in the bitter cold and forced to walk to a nearby school building. After interrogations, some were released but others were taken to undisclosed locations. The colleagues also reported that Dr. Abu Safiya and others were severely beaten during their arrests.
IDF officials first confirmed their arrest of Dr. Abu Safiya, saying that he “was apprehended for suspected terrorist activities.” But subsequently they have claimed to have “no indication of the arrest or detention of the individual in question.”
The family of Dr. Abu Safiya fear that he will share the fate of two other Gazan doctors who were arrested from hospitals and taken to the notorious Sde Teiman military prison where they died of injuries suffered during interrogation. The family, along with officials in multiple human rights organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International are pleading that Dr. Abu Safiya and other medical staff be released immediately. Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard urged Israeli authorities to “urgently disclose” his location, and said that he should be considered a victim of enforced disappearance, “ and as such at great risk of torture and ill-treatment.”
I urge everyone concerned about human rights to contact Senators Tillis and Budd, Representative Foushee, and the White House, to urge the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and also cancellation of the proposed $8 billion in additional arms sales to Israel.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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