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hussam abu safiya
UN Experts Urge Israel to Free Gaza Doctor, Citing Reports of 'Severe Torture'
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya's imprisonment appears "to be flagrantly arbitrary and manifestly inconsistent with the Mandela Rules, which establish the obligation of states to ensure prisoners have access to healthcare.”
Mar 24, 2026
A pair of United Nations human rights experts on Tuesday called on Israel to immediately release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian physician and hospital director who has been imprisoned for more than 450 days and allegedly tortured by his captors.
Israel must ensure Abu Safiya "is granted access to medical examination and treatment," UN Special Rapporteurs Tlaleng Mofokeng and Ben Saul said, adding that the doctor reportedly suffered "severe torture."
“We have received reports that Dr. Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, and that his health condition remains dire,” the experts continued. “The conditions of his detention appear to be flagrantly arbitrary and manifestly inconsistent with the Mandela Rules, which establish the obligation of states to ensure prisoners have access to healthcare.”
“He has been systematically denied critical medical examination and treatment, and deprived of essential care to such an extent that his life, health, and well-being have been gravely endangered,” the pair added.
Israeli troops detained Abu Safiya, who is now 52 years old, on December 28, 2024 amid a prolonged siege and assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, where he served as director. Abu Safiya which refused to evacuate the facility as long as patients were still being treated.
Former detainees released from the notorious Sde Teiman torture prison in southern Israel said they met Abu Safiya there. According to testimonies gathered by the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Abu Safiya was tortured before his arrival at Sde Teiman and inside the facility.
Abu Safiya was subsequently transferred to Ofer Prison in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine, where another renowned Gaza physician, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, died after reportedly enduring torture. UN Palestine expert Francesca Albanese cited reports that al-Bursh was “likely raped to death."
During a previous Israeli attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital, Abu Safiya’s 15-year-old son was killed in a drone strike. Abu Safiya was seriously wounded in a separate drone attack that left six pieces of shrapnel in his leg.
Shortly after Abu Safiya's detention, his mother died of a heart attack attributed to "severe sadness" by the medical charity for which the doctor worked.
A UN commission concluded in 2024 that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who ordered the "complete siege" of Gaza—are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
"Violence against healthcare workers, destruction of health facilities, and underlying determinants of health continue unabated despite a so-called ceasefire in Gaza,” the UN experts said Tuesday. More than 650 Palestinian civilians, including medical professionals, have been killed by Israeli forces since the ceasefire took effect last October, according to Gaza officials.
Overall, more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded over 899 days of Israel's US-backed war, which UN experts, human rights groups, and many others argue is a genocide. Since South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in late 2023, nearly 20 countries have formally intervened to support the proceedings.
Most of Gaza's over 2 million people have also been forcibly displaced—many of them multiple times—and many have suffered starvation and sickness.
The UN experts asserted that countries "have the power to end [Abu Safiya's] torment, and we call on them to use it."
"It is incumbent upon states with influence on Israel and the international community to use all avenues to ensure prevention, recourse, and justice," they added. "Israel must release Dr. Abu Safiya and all healthcare workers, and ensure they have access to appropriate medical care.”
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'The Humanity Cohort': Med School Graduates Offer Hope in Gaza
Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s healthcare delivery and to kill or imprison healthcare professionals, but these 168 students persisted.
Dec 29, 2025
On Thursday, December 25, 2025, during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, 168 students graduated from medical school, in Gaza. Wearing their white coats, they stood in front of the ruined façade of what was formerly Gaza’s largest hospital, the al-Shifa Medical Complex. As a backdrop, the destroyed building realistically conveys perils the graduates faced while earning their medical degrees. Throughout the last two years of their studies, they risked assassination, injury, arrest, imprisonment, and torture, as well as attacks on their own family members.
Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s healthcare delivery and to kill or imprison healthcare professionals. From October of 2023 to October of 2025, The World Health Organization documented 687 Israeli attacks on Gazan healthcare facilities and 211 attacks on ambulances. These attacks killed 985 people. In the same time period, Israel detained over 306 healthcare workers.
Health Care Workers Watch—Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, reports that 95 Palestinian healthcare workers are still in prison, 80 of whom are from Gaza. Prisoners who have been released from detention report that doctors are singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
Among the 80 Gazan healthcare workers who are still detained is the former director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. On December 27, 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya began his second year of imprisonment.
In a better world, in a better future, we can hope that Palestinians graduating from medical school could assemble for an address delivered by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.
For over a year, prior to his incarceration, the Israeli military had subjected the Kamal Adwan hospital to repeated sieges and attacks. Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff, refusing to desert their patients, managed to increase the number of available beds in the hospital as theirs became one of the few hospitals still operating in northern Gaza.
On October 25, 2024, Israel raided the hospital, bombing its buildings, detaining many patients, and arresting all hospital staff, including Dr. Abu Safiya who was interrogated and released. On that same day, an Israeli drone attacked one of the hospital buildings and killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s 20-year-old son, Ibrahim. Dr. Abu Safiya buried his son on the hospital grounds and still refused to abandon the patients.
“The Israeli army does not know what it wants,” Dr. Abu Safiya told a reporter with the Electronic Intifada. “They detained me for a few hours and interrogated me about whether there were fighters inside the hospital, and demanded that I evacuate the hospital completely, but I refused and assured them that there were only patients inside the hospital. But 57 of the hospital’s medical staff were arrested... So we are suffering from a severe shortage of doctors, especially surgeons. Right now, we only have pediatricians—it is a huge challenge to work under these circumstances. I refused to leave the hospital and sacrifice my patients, so the army punished me by killing my son. I saw him die at the entrance gate—it was a great shock. I found a grave for him near one of the hospital’s walls, so that he could stay close to me.”
On December 27, 2024, when Israeli forces threatened to level the whole facility, Dr. Abu Safiya agreed to leave the hospital which was, by then, largely inoperable. An iconic video shows him, clad in his white coat, walking through the rubble toward two Israeli tanks.
He was held incommunicado, and then taken to the Sde Teiman prison, in the Negev desert, where he was interrogated and beaten before being transferred to the Ofer prison. There, he is held in solitary confinement. Only his lawyer has been allowed to visit him. She expresses rising alarm over his weight loss, inadequate healthcare, and frequent beatings.
Amnesty International says he has been forcibly disappeared and arbitrarily held without charge. Even though no charges have been brought against him, an Israeli court has extended his detention multiple times. On October 16, 2025, Israel’s Be'er Sheva District Court added an additional six months to his detention.
Who are the criminals? Israel and its partner, the United States, egregiously flaunt international law, committing numerous war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Dr. Abu Safiya endures daily punishments in return for his courageous dedication to serving victims of war.
In a better world, in a better future, we can hope that Palestinians graduating from medical school could assemble for an address delivered by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Together, they could uphold “the Humanity Cohort,” as the Gazan doctors who graduated in December 2025 call themselves, and safely commemorate the courageous healthcare workers who risked and lost their lives to care for patients during an Israeli genocide that is still ongoing. Confident that healthcare is never a crime, they could cite their fallen colleagues' historic and extraordinary adherence to the United Nation’s core mission, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
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'Free Them All': One Year After Dr. Abu Safiya Abducted, Israel Urged to Release Gaza Health Workers
"We won't forget him nor the 360+ health workers Israel has abducted from Gaza since October 2023," said CodePink.
Dec 26, 2025
Ahead of Saturday's one-year anniversary of Israel abducting Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from the Gaza hospital he ran, advocates demanded the release the scores of health workers still imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces.
"One year ago, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted by the Israeli military along with dozens of other medical staff during a horrific raid on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza," Dr. Yipeng Ge, a member of Doctors Against Genocide, said Friday on social media. "Free Hussam Abu Safiya. Free them all."
Activist Petra Schurenhofer said on X: "It's been a year since Israel abducted and illegally detained Dr Hussam Abu Safiya. And since then he has been languishing in an Israeli jail, being subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment. Don't forget him. And don't stop calling for his release."
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted by the IOF from Kamal Adwan Hospital one year ago this week.Israel has detained & tortured Dr. Abu Safiya for one whole year.We won't forget him nor the 360+ health workers Israel has abducted from Gaza since October 2023.
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— CODEPINK (@codepink.bsky.social) December 24, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Abu Safiya, the 52-year-old director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was seized on December 27, 2024 as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops continued their yearlong siege and raids on the facility in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. The IDF claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan—the last major functioning hospital in northern Gaza at the time—was a Hamas command center.
During a previous Israeli attack on Kamal Adwan, Abu Safiya's 15-year-old son was killed in a drone strike. Abu Safiya was seriously wounded in a separate drone attack that left six pieces of shrapnel in his leg.
After his capture, Abu Safiya was first jailed at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in Israel's Negev Desert—where dozens of detainees have died and where torture, rape, and other abuses have been reported—and then Ofer Prison in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Abu Safiya said he has endured torture by his captors—including beatings with batons and electric shocks—and suffered severe weight loss, broken ribs, and other injuries, for which he was allegedly denied adequate medical care.
Israeli authorities deny these accusations. However, there have been many documented and otherwise credible reports of health and medical workers being tortured by Israeli forces—sometimes fatally, as in the case of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, who headed the orthopedic department at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
According to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, al-Bursh was "likely raped to death," a fate allegedly suffered by multiple Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
Abu Safiya remains in Israeli custody, despite having not been charged with any crimes. Israeli courts have extended his detention multiple times under so-called “unlawful combatant” legal provisions.
In January, Abu Safiya’s mother died of a heart attack that MedGlobal, the Illinois-based nonprofit for which Abu Safiya worked as lead Gaza physician, attributed to “severe sadness” over her son’s plight.
According to United Nations agencies and other experts, Israeli forces have destroyed or damaged nearly all of Gaza's hospitals in hundreds of attacks since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. More than 1,500 Palestinian health workers have been killed.
Last year, an independent United Nations commission found that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”
Israel is currently facing an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation.
Albina Abu Safiya, the imprisoned doctor's wife, pleaded last week: “Save my husband before it is too late. His only ‘crime’ was saving the wounded and tending to the wounds of children.”
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