More than a year after his detention without charges, without trial, and without minimum guarantees of due process, the Palestinian pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remains imprisoned by Israel under conditions denounced as inhuman by international human rights organizations. Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, Abu Safiya was detained following the final assault on the medical facility in late December 2024, as part of an offensive that left the hospital out of service and deepened the collapse of the health system in the Strip. His case is not an error nor an anomaly: it is a symbol. A symbol of the systematic persecution of Palestinian health personnel and of the deliberate demolition of any humanitarian safeguard in Gaza.
According to Amnesty International (international non-governmental human rights organization), Front Line Defenders (international organization for the protection of human rights defenders), Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Palestinian human rights organization based in Gaza), and MENA Rights Group (legal human rights organization for the Middle East and North Africa), Dr. Abu Safiya remains detained under the so-called Unlawful Combatants Law, an Israeli legal framework that allows prolonged detention based on secret files inaccessible to the defense. For weeks he was held incommunicado, without access to lawyers or his family. Amnesty International has denounced severe weight loss, ill-treatment, extreme restrictions on food, hygiene, and medical care, and a progressive deterioration of his physical and psychological health. Al Jazeera (international news network based in Qatar) confirmed on December 27, 2025, that exactly one year after his arrest, Abu Safiya remained imprisoned without charges.
The case has been formally taken up by mechanisms of the United Nations. In January 2025, independent experts of the UN system —including Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory— described the detention of Dr. Abu Safiya as arbitrary and denounced Israel’s systematic disregard for international humanitarian law and the right to health. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented that, according to the Ministry of Health of the State of Palestine (Palestinian health authority), more than 1,500 health professionals have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023; subsequent figures compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs raise that number to more than 1,700 by September 2025. To these killings are added hundreds of health workers detained, interrogated, and imprisoned.
None of this occurs in a vacuum. The indefinite detention of Dr. Abu Safiya is part of a regime of almost absolute impunity enjoyed by the State of Israel, sustained politically, diplomatically, and militarily by the United States. Israel has systematically ignored United Nations resolutions, orders of the International Court of Justice, appeals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and warnings from international medical organizations. Under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, grave human rights violations —attacks on hospitals, killings of civilians, collective punishment, forced displacement, and arbitrary detention— have not only continued but have been normalized as state policy, with the approval and unrestricted support of Washington.
This impunity is not only Israeli. It is shared impunity. Every United States veto in the United Nations Security Council, every arms shipment, every statement that relativizes international law reinforces a devastating message: there are lives that do not matter, crimes that go unpunished, and doctors who can be imprisoned for fulfilling their oath. The complicit silence of a large part of the so-called “international order” turns these violations into a crime that goes beyond Gaza and reaches all of humanity.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is not a combatant. He is a pediatrician. During the most intense months of bombardment, he refused to abandon Kamal Adwan Hospital, remained alongside his patients and his health team even under fire, without electricity, without supplies, under military siege. He fulfilled his Hippocratic oath when the world betrayed him. For that integrity, for that courage, he is imprisoned today. Reaching the end of this year with a doctor incarcerated in Israel’s dark and inhuman prisons hurts. It hurts deeply. It hurts because it reveals how far the global moral conscience has eroded.
This text is activist journalism because there is no possible neutrality in the face of extreme injustice. To speak in the name of Dr. Abu Safiya is to speak in the name of all persecuted doctors, all destroyed hospitals, all the lives that could have been saved and were not. We demand his immediate and unconditional release. We demand guarantees for his life and his integrity. We demand an end to the persecution of Palestinian health personnel. This is not only a call for one man: it is a call for human dignity, for peace, and for the ethical survival of our own humanity.
