CrossFireArabia
British human rights activist Sarah Wilkinson writes: An Israeli [kangaroo] court sentences Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital Dr Hussam Abu Safiya from north Gaza, to six months jail-without-trial.
CrossFireArabia
Amnesty MENA writes:
More than two months since the Israeli military raided and destroyed Kamal Adwan hospital north of the occupied Gaza Strip, detaining patients and medical staff, including the hospital’s director Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya.
Dr. Abu Safiya is being detained without charge or trial under Israel’s repressive Unlawful Combatants’ Law, which violates international law. He told his lawyer he was tortured in custody.
Israel must release him & all arbitrarily detained Palestinians immediately. Health workers must be protected, not targeted.
CrossFireArabia
While the ceasefire in Gaza, Palestine, was implemented on 19 January, after 15 months of all-out war on the people trapped there, all components of society have been destroyed making it almost uninhabitable. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are now able to reach the north of the Strip – which was previously besieged by Israeli forces – to assess the medical and humanitarian needs. The situation is appalling; there is nothing left.
Our colleagues no longer recognise their own neighbourhoods, hospitals have been razed, and people are settling in the rubble of their homes with no other shelter to face the winter conditions. Caroline Seguin, MSF’s emergency coordinator, shares insights and photos from the ground.
In the North Governorate, the level of destruction is total, it’s a flat land. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Our Palestinian colleagues are no longer able to recognise their own neighbourhoods, some were in shock, others literally collapsed.
In Gaza City we were already shocked by the level of destruction, but then we went north to Jabalia, we couldn’t say a word. There is nothing there anymore. Only ruins and the smell of death everywhere because of the dead bodies still trapped under the rubble.
There is no health system anymore in the northern part of the Strip. Kamal Adwan hospital has been razed, while Al Shifa, Al Awda and Indonesian hospitals are seriously damaged and only partially functioning. We were utterly shocked to observe that in Indonesian hospital every medical machine seemed to have been deliberately destroyed; they were smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore. You have to ask, what is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children. It’s devastating to see the state of these hospitals.
The provision of medical care is largely insufficient compared to the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people living in the area. For example, between North Governorate and Gaza city, there are only six paediatric intensive care beds compared to 150 before the war and the number of patient hospital beds has plummeted from 2,000 to 350.
The flow of vital supplies has improved since the ceasefire, but the level of needs is so high that people are still lacking basic items. The need for food, water, tents and shelter materials in this area remains critical. Water shortages are a real challenge given the high level of damage to water facilities and because they are in inaccessible locations in the buffer zones.
Our teams have started water trucking activities in Jabalia and Beit Hanoun and they repair damaged boreholes, but this is a temporary solution and is not sufficient for the massive needs. The problem is that because of the war we have located our activities in the south and it now takes time to redeploy them to the north.
After four weeks since the implementation of the ceasefire, we are still not seeing the massive scale up of humanitarian aid needed in northern Gaza. The humanitarian community is failing to provide vital services to a population in dire need of humanitarian and medical support. Both Israel and international actors need to urgently ensure the delivery of vital supplies such as shelter and food and to increase the capacities for its distribution.
People are living in dire conditions. They try to settle as best they can on the ruins of their houses but it’s extremely difficult. The winter weather means people have to face very cold temperatures, heavy rains and strong winds, and they don’t even have walls around them to protect themselves. They don’t have access to healthcare, decent housing or water.
However, the conditions they had to face during the 15 months of war, being displaced and living in tents were even worse. After this hardship, people need to reunite with their loved ones and want to stay and rebuild their lives. Many of them have no intention of leaving. It is essential to ensure consistent, safe, and secure delivery of humanitarian assistance to people who have suffered unimaginable trauma.
CrossFireArabia
Dr. Nour, a Palestinian doctor working at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was critically injured in the head by shrapnel from an Israeli attack. She now faces life-threatening risks as the Israeli occupation refuses to allow her to leave the Strip for life-saving treatment, according to a Facebook post shared by her sister.
CrossFireArabia
After more than 14 months of the war of extermination on Gaza, the Israeli army continues to target Palestinian medical teams through killing, arrests, torture and disappearances.
The latest is the martyrdom of 31-year-old Thabat Ibrahim Muhammad Salim, a volunteer doctor at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, on 5 January, 2025.
Since the onset of the extermination war the Israeli army has been continuously targeting hospitals and purposely breaking down the health care system.
The Israeli attacks are not limited to health facilities, but include medical staff of doctors, nurses, medical technicians and routinely subjecting them to arrest, imprisonment and torture. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was forcibly taken away since 27 December, 2024, is the best witness of this after he refused to heed to Israeli calls for the forced evacuation of the hospital.
The attacks on Gaza are constant. Last Sunday evening, the Israeli warplanes attacked the Abu Jarbou family home in Block 1 in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza resulting in the martyrdom of four women, including Dr. Thabat Salim. She was greatly mourned.
Dr. Muhammad Halas shared a picture of Dr. Thabat working in the neonatal department, and accompanied it with a comment about the dedication of the late doctor: “Dr. Gaza Thabat Salim, worked without a salary and tirelessly, suffered from hunger, fear, cold and hope. Thebat is a real doctor to the point of martyrdom.”
Director-General of the Health Ministry Dr. Munir Al-Barash said on the X platform: “Dr. Thabat Salim, born in 1994, is a distinguished nursery doctor who mastered the skills and procedures of premature babies amidst the harsh conditions of war. She worked faithfully for nearly a year, before she was martyred a short while ago as a result of the Israeli occupation army’s bombing of a house in the Nuseirat camp.”
Journalist Wael Abu Omar wrote: “Thabat Salim, a doctor and Quran memorizer, studied medicine abroad and is fluent in three languages: Russian, Ukrainian and English. Fate took her to her friend’s house after finishing her work at Al-Awda Hospital, and while she was eating lunch, the house was targeted by the Israeli warplanes. She was identified by her hand only.”
The series of focused attacks on the health sector and its cadres in this war is clear that the aim by the Israelis is to dismantle and destroy this sector entirely as a central part of its military strategy to kill life in the present and future of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian-British doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta is leading a project through the Institute for Palestine Studies to document the targeting and destruction of the health sector in Gaza. He explains the targeting of the health sector is a main pillar of Israel’s failed plan to permanently displace the residents of the Gaza Strip, starting from the north and moving on to the rest of the regions. The occupation’s targeting of all vital sectors, and not limiting it to the destruction of the health and medical facilities, shows that the occupation aims to create a war environment to destroy life as a whole and not just the health sector.
Claiming militarization of hospitals
Since the first days of the extermination war, the Israeli occupation authorities sought to erase the Palestinian population of Gaza by making the Strip unfit for life, and what better way than to target and annihlate the health sector.
On 9 October, 2023, on the third day of the war, the Israeli occupation bombed the Beit Hanoun Hospital in northern Gaza, causing extensive damage. This was the beginning of a series of direct targeting of health sector facilities.
Five days after the bombing of the Hospital, the occupation army bombed the Oncology Diagnostic Center at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. Through phone calls to the directors of 22 hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip, the occupation gave “orders” to evacuate them. Everyone, including the working crews there, refused to comply with the evacuation order, and insisted on keeping the health sector operating in light of the war as a professional, moral, and national necessity.
— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) January 6, 2025
BREAKING: Israel is refusing to allow lawyers to meet with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya to assess his conditions.
According to PHRI:
“The army is refusing to allow the lawyer to meet with Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, so that we can assess his condition and… pic.twitter.com/Li85lSfiRR
Experts say what is happening in the Gaza Strip, from targeting medical personnel and systematic destruction of the health sector, is not a historical precedent, but has been happening for years within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “but the precedent is actually in the form and extent of the destruction.”
The common factor between every storming of a Palestinian camp, village or town is blocking the road to ambulances and paramedics, preventing them from reaching the wounded, and blocking the roads between the storming area and health centers, which leads to an increase in the death toll.
Looking at the process of targeting some hospitals clearly reveals the systematic intention to destroy the health sector in total. The occupation army follows a similar methodology in every hospital: first, they throw allegations these hospitals serve as pockets for Palestinian resistance, orders for the hospital administration to evacuate, then bomb the hospital’s surroundings, then direct bombing, imposing a tight siege, then storming these facilities, destroying the whatever is left of the infrastruction, then grab and frequently kill the people inside.
In some cases, the occupation shortens the siege phase and moves directly to destroying, as it did in Beit Hanoun, Algerian Specialized, and International Eye Hospitals, and even went further to directly liquidating doctors, kidnapping them, and forcible disappearance.
1000 Medical Staff
According to Ministry of Health data published last September, Palestine lost about 1000 health workers, including specialist doctors, surgical and anesthesia technicians, nurses, physical therapy, paramedics, radiology and medical analysis technicians and expert administrators in the field of health sector management. The data also shows the occupation forces arrested and forcibly kidnapped more than 300 people.
Exhausted after a long day of injuries
The killing of Dr. Thabat Salim came within the framework of a series of continuous attacks since the beginning of the war of extermination. In April 2024, Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh, one of the most prominent surgeons in Gaza and head of the orthopedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, was arrested by Israeli forces. He was transferred to Ofer Prison where he was subjected to severe torture that led to his martyrdom.
Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital and one of the most prominent doctors in Gaza, was arrested by Israeli forces on November 23, 2023, during the war on Gaza. Abu Salmiya spent more than seven months in Israeli prisons, where he was subjected to harsh conditions. After his release in July 2024, he spoke about his suffering inside the prisons, describing the conditions as the worst since 1948, calling for serious international action to free Palestinian prisoners.
In October 2023, Dr. Omar Saleh Farwana, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University, was martyred in an Israeli bombing that targeted his home, killing 16 members of his family. He was the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University, and had more than 30 years of experience in treating infertility and IVF.
A day earlier, on October 14, Dr. Medhat Saidam, a burns doctor and surgeon at Al-Shifa Medical Complex, left the complex after seven consecutive days to check on his family, according to a statement by the Ministry of Health. Shortly after his arrival, an Israeli missile fell on the family home, killing the well-known doctor and all of his members where they remain under the rubble of their home.
On November 12, 2023, Dr. Hammam Al-Louh, a specialist in internal medicine and kidney transplantation, was killed in a bombing that targeted his home, where his father was with him.
In circumstances similar to the crime tool, scene, and victims, the medical sector lost on November 18, 2023, the director of internal medicine at Al-Shifa Complex, Dr Raafat Labad, who was one of the most prominent internal medicine and immunology doctors in the Gaza Strip.
The harvest of the Israeli war machine continued to include the head of the Department of Pathology at the Islamic University and Dar Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Ali Dabour, who was martyred in his home with his mother and son, and Dr. Hammam Al-Deeb, a distinguished orthopedic surgeon at the specialized clinic at the private Arab Hospital.
Assassination suspicion
Ministry of Health Director-General in Gaza Strip, Munir Al-Barsh, believes that doctors started to be assassinated soon after the start of the war of extermination post-October 7, 2023. He says “the most important component of life in the Gaza Strip is health, and the occupation wanted to deprive Gaza of its vital element of security, which is public health, by targeting doctors, killing hope in people’s souls and pushing them to emigrate and flee.” He explains the Gaza Strip now “needs 35 years to compensate the doctors who were killed, especially those with specific specialties.”
— Daniella Modos – Cutter -SEN (@DmodosCutter) October 14, 2024
"Our hope is with God"
The Director-General of Health in Gaza, Munir Al Barsh, weeps bitterly in an interview while discussing the ongoing Israeli massacres in northern Gaza and the lack of medical capabilities.
Dr. Munir did not cry on live TV when he had previously lost his… pic.twitter.com/l21982LiKj
The Fourth Geneva Convention and its two additional protocols provided protection for the medical sector and its workers, including ambulance drivers and everyone who helps the wounded during wartime. The agreement went on to state the two conflicting parties must inform each other before the start of fighting where the hospitals are located at. While international humanitarian law stipulates that medical units should not be violated, but protected in accordance with Article 2 of the 1977 Protocol, the Israeli occupation authorities have not adhered to this since the beginning of the occupation of Palestine in 1948.
This article was reproduced from Arabic in the Palestine Information Center.
