Gaza Doctor’s Kidnapping Underscores Israel’s Pattern Of Targeting Health Care

Nearly two weeks after the kidnapping, the Israeli military has yet to release information on Abu Safiya’s whereabouts and status — and will only say that he is in custody and is considered a terror “suspect” without providing evidence to support the claim. Authorities say the doctor is banned from meeting with a lawyer until at least Friday and refused to respond to a legal filing by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel challenging that ban.

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“We don’t know in which facility, we don’t know if he’s safe or not. He is not allowed to meet a doctor yet,” Naji Abbas, director of PHRI’s prisoners and detainees department, said on Wednesday. PHRI has been fighting on behalf of Palestinians the group says are facing human rights violations in Israeli custody, and took on Abu Safiya’s legal case.

“We don’t know what he’s being charged [with]. We assume that they don’t have anything against him,” Abbas continued. “Because from the 26 testimonies that we collected from [detained] health care workers, most of them were told directly that they are not accused or charged with anything, but they will stay in detention. That’s illegal. That’s illegal detention, it’s an illegal arrest.”

Recently released prisoners have told the pediatrician’s loved ones and caseworkers that he is being held at alleged torture camp Sde Teiman, the so-called “Israeli Guantanamo” where detained Palestinians — including health care workers — face inhumane treatment and living conditions. Israeli authorities would not confirm that Abu Safiya is being held at Sde Teiman, though released prisoners described the doctor showing signs of torture.

On Tuesday, Abu Safiya’s family announced that the doctor’s mother had died of a heart attack just months after an Israeli strike had killed his 19-year-old son, Ibrahim. Safiya’s mother had no prior cardiac issues or medical conditions, according to Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of medical aid group MedGlobal. Abu Safiya serves as the organization’s lead physician in Gaza.

“I spoke with her grandson … and he told me she was crying last night and she felt that her son is in distress – and she went to sleep, and she did not wake up,” Sahloul said on Wednesday, adding that she “died out of shock and sadness for what happened to her son.” Abu Safiya does not yet know about his mother, he said.

Despite it being an international human rights violation to target health care workers, Israel legally does not recognize detained Palestinians as prisoners of war — only “unlawful combatants,” says PHRI. Abbas cited a case where Israeli authorities detained a woman in her 80s with Alzheimer’s for two months and prevented her access to a lawyer because she was allegedly an “unlawful combatant.”

The targeting of medical workers combined with Israel’s bombing of hospitals and blocking of humanitarian aid has led to the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health care system – leading injured and sick Palestinians to go without necessary treatment and become infected, creating “untold morbidities and suffering and death that are not counted as victims of war,” Sahloul said.

“Put yourself in the shoes of a patient in the United States who gets injured, say, in a car accident,” said Dr. Syed Sayeed, who returned last week from a medical mission in Gaza. “An ambulance picks them up, they travel on a road, they get to the hospital, they’re triaged by the appropriate physicians, they’re operated on in an appropriate situation, they have adequate nutrition and anti-sepsis measures so they heal, and then they have a rehabilitation phase where they reintegrate into society. Maybe they get their employment back.”

“Every one of these steps is completely and utterly destroyed throughout Gaza,” he continued. “So health care involves not just the building and the physicians, but it’s a complete and utter destruction of the determinants of health.”

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Abu Safiya’s loved ones and caseworkers have asked the international community and medical professionals around the world to not only demand the doctor’s release but to also speak out against Israel’s campaign to destroy Gaza’s health care system. Medical workers across the globe have been staging protests since his arrest, and doctors in the West who volunteered in Gaza plan to speak on Friday about the plight of Palestinian health care workers like Abu Safiya.

Israel’s medical community, however, has been largely silent on Gaza’s health care crisis. While some Israeli physicians have previously described to HuffPost a sort of fear-based code of silence among the medical community, others either don’t know or simply don’t care. Workers in some cases will outright encourage the violence, Abbas said – recounting instances of doctors demanding the Israeli army raid Al-Shifa Hospital, of a doctor bragging about withholding painkillers from a wounded Palestinian patient, and of Health Minister Uriel Busso blocking Israel’s civilian hospitals from treating patients from Gaza.

Abu Safiya “told me one time that he will provide the same care to an injured Israeli soldier, similar to a Palestinian child who ended up in his hospital,” Sahloul told HuffPost just days after the pediatrician’s arrest. “He is the essence of being a physician and humanitarian, and he deserves to have the Nobel Peace Prize. Not to be detained and injured.”