The Horrific Treatment of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya

No one evinced surprise on July 30 when Israel bombed medical warehouses in Gaza. In fact, this crime elicited barely a ho-hum from any media other than Al Jazeera and Mondoweiss, which called it “silent extermination.” Oh, my bad, actually CNN and Reuters briefly covered it, and there were postings on Facebook. But if you wonder why patients die in droves in Gaza, the answer partly lies in negligent news coverage. At least there’s Drop Site News, according to which August 13, “Gaza cancer patients are dying at two to three times the prewar rate after Israel destroyed the enclave’s only specialized cancer hospital…An estimated 17,000 cancer patients now have no access to chemotherapy or advanced care inside Gaza.”

But speaking of negligent coverage, look at the horrific tribulations of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya buried away in the underground Rakefet prison in solitary confinement, where his Israeli guards assault him with hammers and he is starved – this has yet to make the headlines it deserves in Western corporate media. A heroic pediatrician abducted by Israel in 2024, Dr. Safiya’s deterioration to death’s door sped up after he appealed his case in the Israeli courts in June, something for which you could arguably claim his jailers punished him. If he dies, he will be the latest in a grotesque string of Israeli “medicides” – not my locution, one coined by UN human rights activists to describe Israel’s abominable approach to Gazan medicine. The recent bombing of a medical warehouse in Gaza only underlines this coinage’s veracity, while revealing intent to destroy patients by impeding delivery of medical services.

Even more chilling is Israeli foot-dragging when it comes to allowing patients to leave the destroyed enclave for medical care elsewhere in the Arab world. What could be the import of this refusal other than killing them? In the context of a genocide, this may not be surprising, but given that avowed Israeli policy is ethnic cleansing of Gaza, you’d think Jerusalem would eagerly boot these patients out, never to allow them to return. That it apparently prefers them to perish indicates a ghoulish shift in Israeli policy emphasis, namely from expulsion to death. Such a shift is all the more startling given Israeli eagerness to “solve” the Gaza problem once and for all: historically such Israeli solutions have favored expulsion over slaughter.

What this bone-freezing shift suggests is that the depraved settler mentality has taken a cancerous hold and ascendancy in the Israeli body politic since October 7, 2023 and that a consensus has emerged for murder over expulsion. This is terrible news. It means the wider Israeli public really does now see itself as fighting to save Saul’s kingdom and to destroy Amalek. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on the subject early on apparently took root. It’s as if the societal view now is “this time we will preserve Saul’s kingdom.” But Saul was punished – among those other reasons hardline Israelis like to cite – partly for the greed in his heart, the same greed in settlers’ hearts when they covet Palestinian land as the IDF expands the yellow line. Where is the witch of Endor with her prophecy of doom when Israel needs her? Because clearly no one else will tell Jerusalem that in the long run this will end badly, that the world’s revulsion for its blood-soaked adventure and land-greed in Gaza has tectonic implications.

So if Israeli frustration with Palestinian tenacity truly means this horrible shift in emphasis, it’s all the more important for outsiders to end the medicide. For that medicide is a key leg on the table of actual genocide. The fate of Dr. Safiya and the other 83 Gazan medical workers in Israeli custody becomes symbolic: if they perish, Israel is actually committed to extermination over expulsion. (The latter is truly terrible; the former is an unspeakable abomination.)

And that should terrify everybody, especially Jerusalem’s sponsor in Washington, Donald “Board of Empire” Trump: doesn’t he see he’s poised to make history as president whose chief accomplishment in Israel/Palestine could become the actual extermination of the Gazans? Bad enough he takes his place in history as the president defeated militarily by Iran (and who, if things continue at this rate, causes a world economic depression). Does he really want this verdict of extermination on his legacy as well? With Genocide Joe Biden we know the answer: he would not have lifted a finger. But Trump is vain. He wanted the glory of his ceasefire, which he can take credit for, as indeed it decreased the number of Israeli killings. But now this apparent hideous consensus emerges in Israel – what, if anything, will Trump do to save himself from its taint? He has an excuse to act ready at hand, namely Netanyahu’s recent rejection of his deal with Hamas.

Don’t get me wrong: both Israeli objectives, extermination or expulsion, are beyond the pale. But in hell’s hierarchy, extermination is worse, for obvious reasons. And at least if Israelis stuck to expulsion, there’s the chance that over time, they would come to accept reality and give that up. Extermination is worse. If Trump wants to avoid a place in history and in hell as a sponsor of an extermination – one which can still be avoided – he will hurry up and end it, hopefully before doctors like Hussam Abu Safiya expire in Israeli custody.

Meanwhile, according to Haaretz August 9, pro-Palestinian groups clamor for U.S. doctors to quit the American Medical Association – a useless group anyway, if ever there was one. But now it won’t even take a stand for Dr. Safiya in his hour of need, as you’d expect of any self-respecting major medical org. “The campaign, launched by the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, Doctors Against Genocide and Code Pink, charges that the AMA has violated its own policy on civil and human rights by not speaking up for the release of Abu Safiya.”

These groups now circulate a petition for doctors to cancel their AMA membership – one can only hope this shames the very staid, excessively decorous, conflict-averse AMA into supporting the doctor so brutally persecuted by Israel. The AMA has 300,000 members. Were it actually to take a stand, that, in turn, would influence those 300,000 doctors, residents and medical students, many of whom are currently too terrified by corporate and U.S. governmental censorship on this topic to speak up. There have also been protests in Israel calling for Dr. Safiya’s release.

Of course, Dr. Safiya is not alone. Eighty-three other Gazan health care workers currently languish in Israeli prisons and deserve just as much concern. If Dr. Safiya has received more attention, it is because of his salient heroism, refusing to leave his northern Gaza hospital under bombardment, when the Israelis were evidently desperate to dislodge him. In the film, “The Disappearance of Dr. Abu Safiya,” he is shown saying that “this breaks your heart,” this being what he saw daily in his hospital. That he is a man of such evident and capacious heart is clearly what painted a bullseye on his back for the Israelis.

Because Dr. Safiya became a symbol of hope to Gazans, just as now, imprisoned, he has become a symbol of the Israeli atrocities visited on those other 83 detained medical workers. Hopefully, his release, or just the cry for it, will cause the freeing of those others. But sadly, I have to say, don’t hold your breath. The dehumanized thug running Israeli prisons, Itamar Ben Gvir, doesn’t know the meaning of the word humanity, while his underlings mimic his nauseating brutality.

Do the sachems in Jerusalem even realize they stand at a crossroads? That a pact to exterminate Gaza, instead of moving toward two states or one, bi-national state, dooms them too? To obloquy. Enough of that, and some part of the world, some nation just might take action. As of August 12, Tehran said it won’t negotiate with the U.S. until the bloodletting in Gaza and Lebanon is peacefully ended. If Trump had a brain, he’d leap at this chance to end the genocide, claim the mantle of savior of a people otherwise possibly slated for extermination and go down in history as the president who made peace between Iran and Israel. If…

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.