The last image of Hussam Abu Safiya before his arrest by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on 27 December encapsulates the full-scale destruction of the Gaza Strip after 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Walking alone amidst mountains of debris and the charred carcasses of the residential and service buildings that once stood in his hospital’s vicinity, the 51-year-old pediatrician was last seen marching towards an Israeli tank in his white lab coat. He hasn’t been seen since.

Abu Safiya, also the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, which was raided following a day-long siege and shut down by the IOF before Christmas, was reportedly injured while on duty.

Since early December 2024, as the IOF stepped up its military operations in northern Gaza, Abu Safiya had repeatedly pleaded for the protection of his facility and the intervention of the international community. However, all such pleas fell on deaf ears.

A global campaign for his release has seen UN agencies and rights groups expressing alarm at his fate, as Israel continued to deny knowledge of his whereabouts.

Abu Safiya’s teenage son Ibrahim was killed in an earlier raid by the IOF on the Kamal Adwan Hospital last October.

Rights groups citing witnesses said that Abu Safiya is being held in the notorious Israeli Sde Teiman detention centre. Earlier this week, the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said it had received information from recently released detainees at Sde Teiman confirming that Abu Safiya had been subjected to severe torture, leading to a significant deterioration in his health.

This had occurred despite his already being injured by Israeli air strikes on the hospital, “where he worked tirelessly until the facility was stormed and set ablaze by Israeli forces,” the Monitor noted.

In the devastating raid on the hospital two weeks ago, where dozens of homeless Palestinians had sought shelter, a number of people were reportedly stripped and forced to walk towards southern Gaza, whilst critically ill patients were forced to relocate to the Indonesian Hospital, also in northern Gaza, which lacks the necessary equipment and supplies to provide adequate care.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the movement of patients under such conditions poses grave risks to their survival.  

The WHO described the IOF raids as part of the “systematic dismantling of the health system” in Gaza, noting that over a two-month period attacks on health workers and the hospitals in the area have taken place almost daily.

In the week of the raids on the Kamal Adwan Hospital alone, bombardments in the vicinity reportedly killed 50 people, including five health workers from the hospital.

Israel has destroyed 22 hospitals since its war on Gaza started 15 months ago.

According to WHO Representative for the West Bank and Gaza Rik Peeperkorn, over 25 per cent of the 105,000 injured civilians in the Gaza Strip now face life-changing injuries.

Only 16 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals remain partially operational, their collective capacity merely some 1,800 beds, entirely insufficient for the overwhelming medical needs, Peeperkorn said, according to a UN News report.

Citing shortages of medical supplies, equipment, and personnel, he noted that “the health sector is being systematically dismantled” in Gaza.

An Israeli human rights group has filed a petition with the country’s top court demanding the whereabouts of Abu Safiya. Physicians for Human Rights — Israel (PHRI) said in a statement that Abu Safiya’s case “is part of a broader pattern of non-disclosure and unreliable information provided by the Israeli military and prison authorities regarding Palestinian detainees.”

Following an international outcry at Abu Safiya’s arrest, the Israeli authorities admitted they are holding the Palestinian doctor, saying that he was being held as a “suspect” and questioned over “potential involvement in terrorist activity” — accusations that have been questioned by international rights groups and UN special rapporteurs.

A joint statement by UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health Tlaleng Mofokeng and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, called for an end to the blatant disregard of the right to healthcare in Gaza, following the raid on the Kamal Adwan Hospital and Abu Safiya and other medical staff’s arrest.

“For well over a year into the genocide, Israel’s blatant assault on the right to health in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory is plumbing new depths of impunity,” the experts said.

“We are horrified and concerned by reports from northern Gaza, and especially the attack on the healthcare workers including the last remaining of 22 now destroyed hospitals, the Kamal Adwan Hospital,” they said.

“We are gravely concerned with the fate of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, yet another doctor to be harassed, kidnapped, and arbitrarily detained by the Occupation Forces, in his case for defying evacuation orders to leave his patients and colleagues behind. This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy, and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.”

“At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all the critically ill patients,” WHO’s Peeperkorn warned, adding that over 12,000 people remain on waiting lists for urgent treatment abroad.

The Kamal Adwan Hospital is named after Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Kamal Adwan, a Palestinian engineer turned politician who was assassinated by Israeli commandos in front of his wife in his home in the Lebanese capital Beirut in 1973.

A report published by the UN Human Rights Office two weeks ago found that Israel is following a pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza.

During the period covered by the report, between 12 October 2023 and 30 June 2024, there were at least 136 Israeli strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities in Gaza, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics and other civilians and causing significant damage if not the complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Gaza’s official death toll since October 2023 is nearing 46,000, and as the IOF continues its deadly attacks on the besieged Strip widespread famine is the overarching concern, international health organisations say.

A study by the UK medical journal The Lancet in July 2024 calculated that the cumulative death toll is 186,000. Tens of thousands of people are still missing.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly