“They brought me here to kill me,” Gazan Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya told his last known visitor to the Israeli underground Rakefet prison, where he is kept in solitary confinement, tortured, starved and assaulted by guards with hammers. He is not the only one. At least 14 other Gazan doctors currently languish in Israeli prisons, sans charges, under the Unlawful Combatants Law, while estimates for the number of detained medical workers exceed 75. And there have been deaths of these Palestinian medical workers in Israeli custody. Recently, a prominent Israeli tweeted a comparison between “Hamas Safiya” and “Nazi Mengele.” This alarming lie only reinforces the view that Israeli public opinion supports the destruction of Gazan doctors in prison.
And destroyed they have been. According to Drop Site News, July 10, “A newly published testimony alleges Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, the former head of obstetrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital, died after being severely beaten during interrogation following his arrest by Israeli forces in November 2023. At least three doctors have died in Israeli custody during the genocide, Palestinian officials say.” UN human rights experts have used the term “medicide” to describe what Israel has done in Gaza. So Dr. Safiya is not exaggerating: They may very well have brought him there to kill him. After all, killers are in charge in Israeli prisons, and they are killing doctors. Furthermore, Dr. Safiya is not alone; other doctors could meet Al-Rantisi’s fate if someone with power in a place like Washington, D.C. doesn’t lift a finger to help.
Drop Site reports that Al-Rantisi’s family learned of his death through the media, after eight months of agonizing waiting. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, of the 320 healthcare workers detained since October 2023, “83 still [are] imprisoned, including Dr. Abu Safiya.” And on July 10, that news outlet reported that U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded Safiya’s release, saying that he “has been held without charge for 18 months and now faces an imminent threat to his life from torture.” If AOC is saying this, it’s politically acceptable; so hopefully there will be more U.S. congressional calls for justice regarding this atrocity. Meanwhile, also on July 10, an Israeli quadcopter attacked Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and “injured two maintenance workers.” The genocide hasn’t ended. And the Israeli beat goes on…
Evidently Israel singled out Dr. Safiya because he was a hero. It zeroed in on him because he wouldn’t leave his northern Gaza hospital, because he was actually saving lives that Israel doesn’t want saved, because his mere presence inspired hope. And hope, apparently, is what Israel intends to crush. The inscription over Dante’s Inferno truly belongs over Israeli prisons: “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” Except the Israelis aren’t torturing sinners. They’re torturing saints. They can scream that Dr. Safiya is a Hamas colonel as much as they like – the charge that Dr. Safiya was an active Hamas terrorist, anything other than a dedicated doctor, is hooey. And the world knows it.
In a recent Fault Lines documentary, “The Disappearance of Dr. Abu Safiya,” a Palestinian says that the medical profession is sacred and must survive this assault. The irony, of course, is that once upon a time, for Jews, the medical profession WAS sacred, but Israel has trampled that in the mud and in gore, and this sacrilege, this disgusting attack on a vocation to which the victimized naturally gravitate, to which Jews, for millennia, gravitated, may pass unnoticed in Israel, as the urge to extinguish the humane spark that leads Palestinians to choose medicine overcomes and further degrades and shames the Israeli state. What is being done to the doctors in Israeli prisons is known – no matter the efforts to hide it. That it is being done on the orders of dehumanized thugs like Itamar Ben Gvir only fills the world with more revulsion. The worst among us torment the best, with no help anywhere. Still, it is known and will never be forgotten.
If Israeli prison guards murder this doctor, besides being a crime, a sin and a tragedy, that will be another stain on Israel. Not, of course, as gargantuan as the stain of the Gaza genocide, but just as indelible. You’d think someone in the Knesset would wake up to this. You’d think some shred of decency and shame would combine with the more pragmatic promptings of self-preservation to get some Israeli politician, someone other than an Israeli doctor or professor – to repeat, a politician, a person with power – to understand that these state murders must stop and to act on that perception. But maybe this is what it means to be a pariah nation. Utterly un-selfconscious wickedness. Doing evil with gusto and for the praise in the little local echo chamber, while the world looks on, aghast.
It’s encouraging that AOC spoke up about Dr. Safiya, partly because she’s a run-of-the-mill politico, and when such a person feels emboldened enough to speak, it means others may too; hopefully those who finance the monstrous Israeli murder machine, namely U.S. congressmembers. If they could come to feel the truth of their situation, namely that they are, each and every one, personally responsible for the blood being shed by the Israeli regime they arm and pay for, then we might finally be on a path out of this darkness. Congressman Ro Khanna, recently detained and threatened by Israeli settlers and the IDF, might be a good candidate to bear this message: Dr. Safiya is not alone. What’s being done to him is being done to other imprisoned Palestinian doctors.
According to Drop Site News July 12, “Since the ceasefire took effect last October, Israeli forces have killed 1112 Palestinians, including 254 children, 118 women and 34 elderly people and wounded 3548, including 995 children, 619 women and 150 elderly people…Israeli forces have carried out 1600 airstrikes and shelling attacks, 1424 live-fire attacks, 150 military incursions and 404 explosive demolitions across Gaza…Israeli forces have also detained 141 Palestinians since the ceasefire began. Israel continues to occupy approximately 34 square kilometers beyond the agreed withdrawal lines, while blocking repairs to electricity, water and sewage systems and preventing the entry of heavy machinery needed for reconstruction. The report [shared by the Palestinian side] also cites the torture and inhuman treatment of detainees…Israeli forces have averaged 13.1 ceasefire violations every day, since the agreement took effect.” This doesn’t sound like a ceasefire to me – does it to you? Or does it sound like an effort to destroy a people?
Tunnel vision when it comes to demolishing Gaza so impairs Israeli judgment that Likud rulers must consider their nation’s pariah status temporary, that once the Gazans are gone, they will be forgotten, that the way to deal with Palestinian heroes is to kill them. After all, no one has stopped Israel from doing what it wants so far. But someone could. That someone is the United States. Specifically, the someone who sits in the Oval Office. Yet even if Donald “Board of Empire” Trump won’t thwart its atrocities, Israel has succumbed to a delusion, the delusion that it can get away with murder in perpetuity. It can’t. A day will dawn when, to put it colloquially, the show is over. Let’s hope Dr. Safiya survives until then.
