Release Dr Hussam Abu Safia immediately!

Dr Hussam Abu Safia’s life is in imminent danger. This is what his lawyer Nasser Odeh said after visiting him on Thursday in an underground interrogation facility, part of Israel’s Nitzan Prison.

If we do not act immediately, Gaza may lose yet another brilliant doctor, and Israel may get away with yet another brutal crime.

Abu Safia, a Palestinian paediatrician and hospital director, first captured the global spotlight on December 27, 2024. That day footage surfaced of him wearing a white doctor’s coat and walking through the bombed-out rubble of what was once a northern Gaza street towards an armoured vehicle where Israeli soldiers were waiting for him.

He was not surrendering an army; he was surrendering the small but critical Kamal Adwan Hospital after 85 days of siege as his staff and patients were forced to leave at gunpoint. A hospital that should have been protected by international law, international leaders and the United Nations but instead was attacked, deprived of medicine, electricity and supplies.

At least 30 people were killed and 20 injured in the hospital when Israeli troops stormed it on December 6, 2024. When his teenage son Ibrahim was killed outside the hospital, Abu Safia said the funeral prayers himself before rushing back to his child patients.

The photo and video of Abu Safia’s last moments of freedom were shared globally on social media, capturing the attention of millions and demonstrating the limits of social media activism. The global spotlight didn’t change his or Gaza’s fate or the politics of the rogue state of Israel.

Abu Safia is not a “terrorist” nor a “combatant”. If anything, he is the defender of life who stands by his patients: Palestinian children under Israeli occupation, targets of bombing, sniper fire and the sadistic Israeli siege causing widespread starvation, thirst, disease and premature death among them.

Israel claims Abu Safia is “affiliated with Hamas” and has detained him under the Unlawful Combatants Law. No evidence has been presented to prove these allegations, no criminal indictment has been brought, and no independent observer has been able to examine the intelligence said to justify his detention.

On June 10, Abu Safia was finally seen in public after more than 500 days of brutal imprisonment. He appeared via videolink from the dreaded Nafha Prison during an Israeli Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem. He was handcuffed and shackled, looked emaciated and unwell, but he had a calm and dignified posture. Less than a month later, his lawyer visited him in Nitzan Prison. He had trouble recognising his client because he was so badly beaten and was losing consciousness during the meeting.

Abu Safia is one of hundreds of Palestinian medical workers whom Israel has detained. Fourteen doctors, including him, remain in Israeli detention camps and prisons. Two have not made it out alive, and 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed.

Why are Palestinian medics and hospital staff arrested, detained, tortured and killed by Israel? For decades, Israeli occupation forces have been targeting Palestinian healthcare, in violation of international law, to promote ethnic cleansing and collective punishment as part of their settler-colonial project. The Israeli epistemicide aims to erase all signs of Palestinian knowledge, infrastructure and civil society.

To cover up their crimes, the Israeli military has claimed that Gaza’s hospitals are military hideouts or “command centres” for the Palestinian armed resistance. To date, they have not been able to produce independent, verifiable proof of this. I have myself worked in various hospitals in Gaza for 25 years, mostly at al-Shifa in Gaza City, and never ever seen any proof of such use of either hospitals or ambulances.

The arrest, abuse and torture of Palestinian medics and other staff from Gaza’s hospitals aim to force false confessions of such use of hospitals in Gaza. Unsuccessfully. My colleagues have never yielded. They have stood by the truth.

But there is another Israeli motivation for detaining and mass-killing medical workers as well. Hospital staff bear witness and are directly involved in documenting Israeli war crimes. Since the start of the genocide, paediatricians like Abu Safia have raised the alarm about Israel’s purposeful targeting of Palestinian children with the aim of extermination.

What they have said all along was finally captured in a recently released UN report that concluded that there was clear evidence of “Israel’s deliberate and direct targeting of Palestinian children” and the destruction of “the essence of childhood”.

More than 24,000 of Gaza’s children have been killed, an average of one Palestinian child killed by Israeli occupation forces every hour for 1,000 days.

As of September, at least 1,009 of the killed children were babies or toddlers. Nearly half (450) of these babies were born and killed during the war. At least 42,011 children have been injured.

One million Palestinian children remain under the sadistic Israeli siege, homeless, food insecure and without access to safe drinking water, regular schooling or proper medical care. The killing and maiming of Gaza’s children continues on a daily basis.

A senior Gaza paediatrician recently described to me the life of Gaza’s schoolchildren thus:

“The most important tasks that school students perform every morning are: firstly, the search for water; secondly, the search for food at food distribution centres; and thirdly, collecting some waste that can be used as kindling. … So every morning, you find hundreds of children rummaging through the garbage, searching for anything that can be used to start a fire.”

Like the killed and starved children of Gaza, Abu Safia is a prominent symbol of Israel’s rogue nature. That is why, the Israeli authorities continue to torture him and keep him in solitary confinement while Israeli courts deny his appeals for release.

My Palestinian colleagues in Gaza are not just calling for Abu Safia’s release, for humanitarian relief for hospitals and for an end to the targeting of medical workers. They are demanding an immediate end to the occupation and siege and the restoration of the basic conditions that make health possible: human security, dignity, food, water, justice and the protection of civilian life. The root problem in Gaza now, as it was 1,000 days ago, is the United States-supported Israeli colonial occupation, the sadistic siege, structural violence and apartheid.

Neither an international band-aid with a few Israeli-controlled visiting international medical teams nor international empty lip service with passive condemnation will change the situation. The only way forward from a preventive medical perspective is harsh formal international sanctions and isolating boycotts of Israel to stop this genocide, end the occupation and save lives.

Time is running out. History will judge us. There are no excuses.

Do something, do more – or be complicit.

This is our responsibility; this is the responsibility of each Western politician, parliament and government. Everyone can do their share. Be active, protest and organise solidarity and support for the just struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people.

Seventeen years ago during the 2009 Israeli war on Gaza, I shouted from al-Shifa Hospital:

“We wade in death, blood and amputees. Many children. Pregnant women. I have never experienced anything this horrible. Now we hear tanks. Tell it, pass it on, shout it. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We’re living in the history books now, all of us!”

Do something! Do more! has never been more imperative.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.