Time is running out to save the life of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was abducted by Israel’s military and has been held captive for over 18 months without charge.

Time is running out to save the life of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was abducted by Israel’s military and has been held for over 18 months in Israeli detention without charge. Dr. Abu Safiya’s lawyers report that he has suffered extreme torture and medical neglect and that his life is in mortal danger, but Israel has repeatedly ignored international calls to free him. We speak about the current condition of Dr. Abu Safiya and international efforts to free him with Dr. Nidal Jboor and Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle, cofounders of Doctors Against Genocide.

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Credits:

  • Producer: Rosette Sewali
  • Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Time is running out to save the life of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital who was abducted by Israel’s military and has been held for over 18 months in Israeli detention without charge and was last seen showing visible signs of extreme torture and medical neglect. His family has issued this plea to people of conscience around the world. Take a listen.

Speaker 2:

My father was unable to breathe. My father was unable to speak. His face was disfigured from the marks of torture and pain, especially after the last court session held in Jerusalem at the Supreme Court. We still call out plead and appeal and beg to all the free people of the world and to everyone with an atom of humanity in their heart to save my father’s life before it’s too late.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The rogue state of Israel has repeatedly ignored the demands and desperate pleas from around the world to free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. And with us today to tell you what you need to know and what you can do. I’m grateful to be joined today by Dr. Nidal Jboor and Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle, co-founders of the group Doctors Against Genocide. Thank you both so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Can you please start by telling our audience what we know and what we don’t know about the current state of Dr. Abu Safiya and the other doctors and medical workers who are also being held captive by Israel right now?

Dr. Nidal Jboor:

Yeah, I thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for helping us speak about this important topic. And yes, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is one of the greatest human beings that we knew. We consider him a friend. He used to come on our webinars every week to report on the situation in his hospital and on the children that he was treating and trying to protect and save their lives in the hospital. So we consider him one of our own. We know this guy, we can vouch for him. He’s not just a number, he’s not an abstract. He is part of us, part of the medical community and a close friend for us. And he appealed to us and to the whole world to come and save him, save the children, save the other doctors, save the patients in the hospital many times before he got abducted. And we tried our best to share his voice, his appeal.

One of his appeals was even to President Trump just after he got elected before he assumed presidency. But unfortunately we all failed him. We failed the children, we failed the other doctors and they were raided, they were invaded. He was abducted along with many other doctors and nurses and healthcare workers. Many of them got shot. One of them got murdered during that raid. Many of the patients got killed. The others were forced to flee. They also abducted many patients. And since then for more than 560 days now, he’s been enduring the most horrific conditions you can imagine. He lost more than half of his weight. He’s being tortured, he’s been held in solitary confinements for long periods of time. And we have been speaking to everyone trying to help him. But what made this call even more urgent is almost a week ago and after long delays, his lawyer managed to see him and he could not recognize him at all.

He didn’t know that this is the person that we know. He witnessed, and that’s the lawyer testimony, severe signs of torture all over him. And his head, neck, behind his ears, all over his body with fresh bruises, active bleeding. He was not able to sit in the chair to finish the interview. His consciousness was on and off. He reported to the lawyer that they have been beaten him with batons, with hammers, with metal objects, and they are intent on killing him. He’s been there for solitary confinements for more than a few weeks since the Supreme Court of Israel refused to take his case. And the last thing he shared with the lawyer is that I don’t think you’ll see me next time. I don’t think I’ll survive this. They’re killing me. And we sit here as doctors, healthcare workers, human beings all over the world.

Watch a human being being tortured in front of all of our eyes. We failed him once. We don’t want to fail him again. This is not acceptable for any doctor, for any healthcare worker, for any human being. There are all types of absolute prohibition of torture under all international laws, international humanitarian laws, Geneva conventions. And even here in the United States as a medical community, we have all our major organizations, the American Medical Organization, the American Psychiatric Organization, the American Psychological Organization. All of them have resolutions and codes of ethics that absolutely prohibit torture under any circumstances for anyone anywhere, regardless of their chart, regardless of their crime, regardless who they are. And these resolutions have been enacted and passed in the last decade. So in light of this, we will not sit down and watch him being killed. We don’t think any human being deserves to be tortured regardless of who they are, especially someone that we know personally.

We know he’s innocent. We know he did not commit any crime other than refusing to abandon the children he was taking care of. And we are calling upon our major medical organization who are unfortunately until now completely silent on this. They’re betraying their own ethics, their own ethics and codes of conduct that they are imposing on us. And we are demanding that at least to live up and asking them to live up to their own codes of ethics, not anyone else, and to speak up and to issue a statement and to reach out to the Israeli Medical Association. And they do have power, they do have leverage, and we know that if they move, we can save at least the life of Dr. Hassem along with his other colleagues. Yes,

Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle:

This is pretty much where we stand. As doctors again, genocide, our mission is to mobilize the medical community and to speak up against war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. We have many members, have thousands of members all over the world. And we have heard the call from Rasda, the physician syndicate in Raza called for a standout for acts of solidarity with them and with their colleagues who have been detained by Israel in torture camps and torture prisons. So the medical syndicate in Raza is calling on the colleagues, the medical community, the medical community in the rest of Palestine, in the West Bank, in Jordan, all over the world. We are calling on our members to take a stand. We have dedicated an hour of our day today to make all the people with conscious to take action. The action could be calling the elected officials.

We have placed thousands of phone calls to the Senate, to the Congress, to the Parliament in Canada, to different politicians all over the world. We have been calling our medical associations. We have been taking stances with protests and standouts and visuals and all our actions are coming through with social media and our members’ communications. And our goal from that is to mobilize, to raise awareness, not to be silent. We understand that silence in situations of torture and abuse is complicity. It is against our medical oath. It is against what we stand for as humans and as doctors, as healthcare workers. So we invite all our colleagues to not choose comfort and not choose security over doing the right thing. Doing the right thing means that we stand for each other, especially when one of us or many of us are being tortured just for taking care of patients within the context of a genocide.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, thank you both so much for that. I really appreciate it. And I wanted to ask if we could also tell viewers and listeners right now where things stand with the current efforts from within Israel and from around the world to free Dr. Abu Safiya, because obviously time is of the essence here.

Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle:

We are optimistic. We have been seeing a positive response from our elected officials here in the US where we live and all over the world. We have seen a tremendous amount of mobilization. Everyone knows the story now. Every phone call to elected officials, they have heard it before one of us calls. We are hopeful that this coordinated pressure will bear fruits and we will see our colleagues released and we will see their health restored to them, their dignity restored to them. All they want is to be able to take care of their patients and to see their family members and to have human dignity. What we have experienced is the removal of human rights and human dignity from people who deserve the best.

Dr. Nidal Jboor:

And his lawyer sent another urgent appeal to the court to allow independent medical evaluation of Dr. Hussam because we think he might be suffering from an intracranial bleed after all these beatings. That’s why he was not able to sit. That’s why his consciousness was variable during the interview. Unfortunately, they did not respond yet. We’re waiting on that. And actually his appeal includes that one of the judges, one of the Supreme Court judges go there and verify for themselves the situation of Dr. Hussam. We are also working closely with a group called Physician for Human Rights Israel. They’re already appearing on behalf of Dr. Hussam and another 16 doctors who continue to be held unlawfully in Israel and all of them are being tortured. There is a total of more than eight healthcare workers who continue to be enduring these conditions there and a total of more than 9,500 Palestinian hostages.

All of them are being detained illegally with no charges, with no protections. Even the International Center for International Red Cross appealed the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Israel ordered the state to allow the Red Cross to visit and verify the situation and the treatment of the prisoners and the state is refusing their own Supreme Court order. Can you imagine this? Even the International Red Cross is not able to go in there and check on them, at least make sure they’re being treated in human conditions and not enduring torture. And we cannot emphasize enough the absolute prohibition on torture under all international laws, Geneva conventions and here in the United States. There was something called the Hoffman Report. The Hoffman Report is a report that was made on behalf of the American Psychological Association, I think in 2005 or 10, because some psychologists at that time were complicit with the Bush administration in torturing those that they took from Iraq and from Afghanistan.

They were treating them badly at detention centers Guantanamo Bay. And that was a very lengthy report, detailed report, almost 500 pages that showed some complicity of some psychologists and medical employees in the torture of those detainees. And the recommendation with the report and the resolution that the American Psychological Association took after that is there is absolute prohibition of torture for anyone anywhere under any circumstances, even if they’re terrorists, even if they’re guilty. If you have someone charged with a crime, even if they are criminal, you’re not allowed to torture them. There is absolute prohibition torture. And this is a code of ethics that we as a medical community cherish and we insist to live up to and we cannot stay silent while one of our own or any human being undergoes these conditions. So we are really appealing to everyone. So far we have few elected officials, few Congress people and senators did speak up on behalf of Dr. Hassem, but there are too many.

We are hoping we are appealing that many more of our politicians appeal on his behalf to save him. And we do know that they do have the leverage on Israel. This is the country that the US supports with billions of dollars in weapons and impunity. So our Congress stricted officials, they do have a say. They can save one life if they use their leverage with the state department, with our embassy in Israel, with the Israeli ambassador here. Our medical and mental healthcare organizations, they do have leverage if they speak up. Again, this is regardless of your politics, regardless of where you stand, this is a humanitarian call to save human life that is being taken away in front of our eyes and we should not have any controversy about it. Regardless of our positions, this should not be controversial. This is a humanitarian call, a universal call, and it’s a very, very urgent call.

We don’t think he will survive until the end of the week. So the call should be immediate and urgent. We urgently appeal. Every human being, wherever you are, do everything in your power. Reach out, call, use every leverage you have to try to step in and do something to save the life of our colleague, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and his other colleagues too.

Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle:

I appeal to all my colleagues, especially pediatricians. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is a pediatrician just like all of us. His fault was that he stayed in the pediatric hospital in the north of Gaza to take care of the children who are sick in Razda and he could not bring himself to leave them without medical care. For that he was punished by being taken hostage. I appeal to every doctor, every nurse, every pediatrician, especially to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Take a stand. Do not stay silent while one of us is being tortured. And to all our colleagues, follow us on Doctors Again Genocide. We have a lot of information that you can use to become more active in advocacy against what is happening to our colleagues, advocacy against torture and advocacy to be a more responsible medical community. And thank you so much for hosting us.

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