The Heartbreaking Case of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Now at Death’s Door

Eve Ottenberg

 July 28, 2026

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“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.

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

We Must Act With the Same Moral Courage as Dr. Hussam Abu Saffiya: Free Dr. Abu Safiya Now!

National Single Payer

 July 27, 2026

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Dr. Hussam Abu Saffiya, outside Gaza’s battered Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2024. Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.

Summary: National Single Payer, a national, grassroots organization joined by the principles that health care is a human right, must be free from profit, and will be achieved through national legislation, endorses the appeal issued by Doctors Against Genocide for immediate international action on behalf of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician detained by Israeli Occupation Forces in December 2024 because he refused to abandon his patients under his care. We call on every government, medical association, hospital, university, humanitarian organization, and elected official to demand his immediate release.

National Single Payer  has endorsed an appeal issued by Doctors Against Genocide for immediate international action on behalf of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician and former Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza, detained by Israeli authorities on December 27, 2024 because he refused to abandon the patients under his care as his hospital was under assault.

Dr. Abu Safiya has been detained in Israeli prisons for more than 18 months without formal criminal charges where he has been beaten and tortured and held in solitary confinement.  As a result, his health has deteriorated and his life is in imminent danger.

The detention of Dr. Abu Safiya is part of an international effort to demonstrate that health care workers are not safe or protected.  There have been over 400 health care workers illegally abducted by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza since October 2023. In addition to Dr. Abu Safiya, 16 other doctors from Gaza remain detained illegally and 80 health care workers are still held without charge.  The death toll among Palestinian health care workers is now over 1700.

As a national, grassroots, social justice organization that organizes locally in the struggle for national single payer health care in the U.S., united by the common principles that health care is a human right, must be free from profit, and must be achieved through national legislation, the Steering Committee of National Single Payer endorses the following appeal and strongly encourages national medical associations, hospitals, universities, and health care professional worldwide to do so also.

National Single Payer joins Doctors Against Genocide in calling for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s:

+ Immediate proof of life.

+ Immediate independent medical evaluation and all necessary medical treatment.

+ Immediate and unrestricted access by his lawyer and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

+ Protection from torture and all cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

+ Immediate release.

In addition, National Single Payer calls for:

+ The immediate release of all healthcare workers detained without due process consistent with international humanitarian law.

+ Independent investigation and accountability for alleged torture, deaths in custody, and other serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remained beside his patients when it placed his life at risk. Today, his own life and our own moral integrity depend on whether the international community acts with the same courage.

There is still a narrow window to act. Recent judicial proceedings requiring the Israeli government to report on Dr. Abu Safiya’s condition create an opportunity for urgent international engagement. Every government, medical association, hospital, university, humanitarian organization, and elected official with the ability to act should do so now.

For more information: 

https://doctorsagainstgenocide.org/statements/release-dr-abu-safiya

National Single Payer Steering Committee: J. Albert, C. Cohen, E. Grystar, A. Malinow, J. Noh-Smith, K. Tillow.

As Netanyahu Prepares to Meet Trump, Explosion of Israeli Settler Violence Draws International Condemnation

“Governments need to act urgently so that the Israeli government does not continue to act as if it has a green light to commit further atrocities,” said a researcher at Human Rights Watch.


A young Palestinian boy is seen at a mosque allegedly burned by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on July 26, 2026.
(Photo by John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 27, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to meet with US President Donald Trump this week, Israeli soldiers stormed into several villages across the occupied West Bank on Monday, expanding a rolling campaign of violence waged by illegal settlers in recent days.

Over the weekend, armed settlers rampaged across more than a dozen Palestinian communities, torching homes and farmland, vandalizing buildings and cars, and burning a pair of mosques in Qusra and Kour.

They were acts of retaliation after two armed Israelis were killed while helping dozens of settlers carry out what Palestinian physician and political leader Mustafa Barghouti described as a “terrorist attack” in the village of Tell, near Nablus in the northern West Bank. That assault killed four Palestinians.

Tell was one of dozens of Palestinian communities to be attacked in recent weeks as part of a campaign of escalating settler violence egged on by the Israeli government as it seeks to cement total control over the West Bank.



More than 150 settler attacks involving killings or property damage have been documented in the West Bank so far this month, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that 21 Palestinians have been killed by settlers this year, already more than were killed in all of 2025.

While the Israeli military has said it was working with police to investigate the desecration of the two mosques, which were burned and spray-painted with graffiti calling for “revenge” and “blood,” settlers have almost never faced accountability in Israeli courts.

This weekend’s violence, meanwhile, has been openly egged on by members of Netanyahu’s government, which ordered more troops into the territory, where they have raided over 20 towns as of Monday morning.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an architect of Israel’s accelerating settlement construction, said Tell should “look like the refugee camps in Nablus and Tulkarem,” referring to West Bank villages devastated by Israeli home demolitions that displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians last year.

Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the town should be treated like the village of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, which has largely been reduced to rubble by Israeli attacks. He also said he’d demand that Israel bomb and bulldoze Palestinian homes.

The military said it arrested at least 130 Palestinians across the West Bank over the weekend, while just two Israeli settlers tied to extremist violence have been arrested, with no details released about charges or what attack they were involved in.

Nida Ibrahim, a reporter for Al Jazeera, said on Monday this was typical: “Israeli settlers continue their attacks against Palestinians, mostly in their homes, at night, intimidating them. And what happens is that usually Israeli forces would come in and instead of curbing these settlers, they would conduct arrests in the occupied West Bank among Palestinians.”

She said Palestinians felt like they had “no one to protect them,” while “the Israeli settlers have the support of the Israeli army and have the impunity to continue attacking Palestinians without any accountability.”

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israeli analyst who specializes in settlement policy, argued that settlers’ confrontations with Palestinians were meant to provoke retaliation and a military response that allows them to deepen Israeli control of the territory.

“What everyone needs to understand is that the settlers in the West Bank intentionally cause these violent confrontations,” Ben-Ephraim wrote on social media. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, the Palestinian victims don’t even react. Then in the 1% when they do, the IDF treats it as terrorism and starts killing and arresting the victims and giving the land to the settlers.”

“This is a method,” he said. “It will not stop until there is nothing left.”



This weekend’s escalation was met with renewed international outcry from governments and human rights groups who demanded accountability for illegal settlers and the officials enabling them.

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories, described the ongoing attacks against Palestinians as “pogroms against defenseless civilians.”

Sarah Sanbar, an Israel-Palestine researcher for Human Rights Watch, said this weekend’s conflagration occurred because “the Israeli government didn’t prevent the settler attacks on Tell village, so now it needs to stop settler reprisals and escalating military action that will make a bad situation worse.”

She added that “governments need to act urgently so that the Israeli government does not continue to act as if it has a green light to commit further atrocities.”

Jordan’s foreign ministry condemned the “escalating settler terrorism” in the West Bank, while the state of Qatar said the attacks were a “flagrant violation of international law and international legitimacy resolutions.”

The European Union issued a more muted statement, without naming Israel or mentioning the involvement of illegal settlers and instead calling on “all parties to avoid inflammatory language.”

Spain, meanwhile, was much more direct, calling out “violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers, who continue to act with impunity” and calling on Israel to “reverse its policies of settlement expansion and of shielding settler violence.”

As of Monday morning, the Trump administration has remained silent on the violent events of the past weekend, beyond a generic State Department statement condemning violence “by any party.”

This is consistent with its policy of unrestrained military support for Israel and legitimation of its project to settle occupied Palestine in violation of international law.



Nabil Fahmy, the secretary general of the Arab League, urged Trump to push Netanyahu this week to restrain “the Israeli government’s extremist ambitions,” including its implementation of a “de facto annexation in the West Bank.”

Nearly 600 Israeli military, police, and intelligence officials with the group Commanders for Israel Security likewise urged Trump to pressure Netanyahu to rein in the violence, saying it was in the interest of US and Israeli security.

“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and US regional interests,” wrote former IDF Chief of Staff, Retired Maj. Gen. Matan Vilnai in an open letter sent to the president on Monday. “It is no secret that certain members of our current government orchestrate much of this chaos, including by shielding their followers—who are armed and driven by messianic impulses—from the law and its enforcement.”

Despite State-Backed Israeli Settler Violence, the Palestinians Will Persevere

As Zionists-cum-Israelis have used violence and dispossession for well over a century in attempts to drive Palestinians out of Palestine, do they really think that they will ever fully succeed?


Palestinians take to the streets to resist as Israelis raid the town of Sarra, under the protection of the Israeli army, in Nablus, West Bank, Palestine on July 24, 2026.
(Photo by Issam Rimawi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Peter F. Crowley
Jul 27, 2026

Common Dreams

It would seem that the Israeli settlers are out of control. Their violent actions have either been encouraged by the Israel Defense Forces or Israeli government, or protected by the former and quietly supported by the latter. This support exists as they set homes on fire, attack Palestinian residents, and destroy their olive trees in the West Bank. Such terrorist activity is rarely penalized in the country’s justice system because the state supports the policy of mass expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank.

Last Friday in Tal, four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after there was an ISIS-like incursion into the Palestinian village. A Palestinian living in one of the attacked homes grabbed a settler’s rifle and shot two Israelis before being killed by the IDF. In response to this act of self-defense, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated for turning the West Bank into Beit Hanoun, a city in Gaza that Israel destroyed during its genocide. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for “intensive counterterrorism operation[s]” and for settler outposts to expand in the West Bank.

The ISIS-KKK-like terrorist settlers reacted by torching mosques and setting fire to homes in villages, attacking an ambulance transporting a patient, and firing live ammunition at Palestinian residents. This comes on the heels of Israeli settlers detaining US Rep. and 2028 presidential hopeful Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in early July when he visited a Palestinian village that had been destroyed by settlers.

In the wider context, Israeli settlers and the IDF have killed nearly 1,200 Palestinians, including 250 children, in the West Bank since the genocidal war on Gaza after October 7. Making matters worse, Israeli terroristic violence by settlers has increased by 63% in the first half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. They may seem unhinged, but it is the far-right government that has fueled this level of violence.

The appearance of the Israeli settlers being out of control is a sleight of hand. They are working, like the KKK did under state governments in the American South, under the auspices of the Israeli government.

With horror, in the ashes of the failed Iraq War, ISIS drove masses of people from their homes across wide swaths of Iraq and Syria during the mid-2010s in the hope of reestablishing an Islamic state that was far more brutal than any Islamic caliphate throughout history. The creation of Israel was similar, in the hope of establishing a long-lost Jewish state in historic Palestine via ethnic cleansing of roughly 750,000 people. Both ISIS and Zionist-Israeli forces and settlers have, over time, driven millions of residents from their homes using genocide, terror, and mass murder to recapture an imagined past. ISIS was defeated thanks to Iran, the United States, Syria, and Iraqi forces working together. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli version of ISIS reawakened from its post-Nakba lull, but at a slower pace until the 21st century. It was in this century that we have seen vast, state-backed settler expansion, land theft, and the destruction of Palestinian livelihoods, usually under the approving eyes of the IDF and the Israeli government. We have also seen over 73,000 Gazans killed by the IDF in the past three years during the genocidal war; the dead were mostly civilian, including about 21,000 children. Now the Israeli army, reneging on ceasefire terms, controls 70% of the Gaza Strip and already has plans for three Israeli settlements in Gaza where 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced.

But as Zionists-cum-Israelis have used violence and dispossession for well over a century in attempts to drive Palestinians out of Palestine, do they really think that they will ever fully succeed? They certainly have the US superpower’s blessing.

Yet the people of Palestine have time and perseverance on their side. They have a history that has seen the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, and Greek empires come and go. They have seen the uncouth Crusaders’ relatively brief attempt to occupy the Holy Land. They’ve borne witness to the Byzantine, Umayyad, and Abbasid regimes. But they are still resisting in Gaza and the West Bank.

The appearance of the Israeli settlers being out of control is a sleight of hand. They are working, like the KKK did under state governments in the American South, under the auspices of the Israeli government’s goal of annexing and depopulating the West Bank of its Indigenous Palestinians.

However, they will not succeed.

The Palestinians have resilience and justice on their side. They have the support of people around the world, particularly in developing countries, and increasingly in Europe and even the United States. For example, this month Democrats in Congress followed the will of the American people and voted overwhelmingly to block military assistance to Israel.

This is only a start.

Despite the odds, Palestinians have always shown courageous resilience during famine, genocide, and land theft. Having more international support will ensure that they are not removed from their land.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Peter F. Crowley
As a prolific author from the Boston area, Peter F. Crowley writes in various forms, including short fiction, op-eds, poetry, and academic essays. His writing can be found in Pif Magazine, New Verse News, Counterpunch, Middle East Monitor, Galway Review, Digging the Fat, Adelaide’s Short Story and Poetry Award anthologies (finalist in both), and The Opiate. He is the author of the poetry books Those Who Hold Up the Earth and Empire’s End, and the short fiction collection That Night and Other Stories.
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‘Stop All Military Aid’: Sanders Condemns US Complicity in Israel’s Decimation of Gaza

“We have funneled tens of billions of dollars in military aid to an Israeli government that has consistently violated international law and whose leader is a war criminal.”


A Palestinian boy carrying a quilt walks past destroyed buildings following an Israeli strike on Gaza City on July 24, 2026.
(Photo by Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jul 27, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday decried the ceaseless and horrific suffering that the Israeli military has inflicted on the population of the Gaza Strip with the assistance of American weapons, complicity that the Vermont senator called “shameful” and illegal under international law.

“We have funneled tens of billions of dollars in military aid to an Israeli government that has consistently violated international law and whose leader is a war criminal,” wrote Sanders (I-Vt.), referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a fugitive from the International Criminal Court who is expected to travel to the US this week. “Enough is enough! Congress must listen to the American people. NO MORE US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL.”



Sanders, who has repeatedly tried to block Trump administration arms sales to Israel, noted that the Israeli military’s genocidal assault on Gaza has continued during the so-called ceasefire agreement enacted last year, with Israeli forces aggressively extending their reach into the occupied Palestinian territory.

The Associated Press reported last week that “the Israeli military is quietly but quickly building a giant earthen barrier separating the over 50% of the Gaza Strip it controls from the rest of the territory, according to satellite imagery, further entrenching the division of the tiny Palestinian enclave.”

“More than 23 kilometers (14 miles) have been constructed in recent months, running through Palestinian communities demolished by the military,” AP observed. “That is equivalent to more than half the length of the coastal strip, which is some 40 kilometers (25 miles) long and 11 kilometers (7 miles) wide, and home to over 2 million Palestinians.”

Sanders noted in his statement on Sunday that Israel “now controls an estimated 70% of Gaza, well beyond what they agreed to, and has built dozens of military outposts inside Gaza since the ‘ceasefire’ began.”

“In the nine months since the ‘ceasefire’ was announced, Israel has killed at least 1,150 Palestinians, including a family of six last week,” the senator wrote. “Now, as if to remove any doubt about their intentions, senior leaders of the Netanyahu government are moving to make the occupation permanent.”

“The good news is that the American people are catching on,” Sanders added. “More and more Americans—Democrats, Republicans and independents—are demanding that we stop all military aid to Israel and use our considerable leverage to end the suffering of the Palestinian people.”