Dr Abu Safiya Symbolised Humanity In Gaza. Israel And The West Are Destroying It – Middle East Eye

January 13, 2025 TheMcgwire

Dr Abu Safiya Symbolised Humanity In Gaza. Israel And The West Are Destroying It

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya , in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp

The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

🔗SOURCE ➡️ Middle East Eye

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