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Friday, January 10, 2025

Dr. Abu Safiya Symbolized Humanity in Gaza. Israel and the West Are Destroying It

 
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.
It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.
2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.
Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.
It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.
After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.
The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.
Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known pediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.
By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.
A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.
The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.
Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.
This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.
Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.
‘Consciousness warfare’
Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.
That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.
Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.
Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.
They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.
The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.
But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.
The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.
And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.
And that is exactly what they did.
Red herrings
Looking back, the brief furor over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.
Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.
Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control center”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.
These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.
Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.
The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.
Mass graves
Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.
These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalization for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centers with utter abandon.
Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.
Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.
Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.
For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.
Similarly, a World Health Organization official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: “The health sector is being systematically dismantled.” The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. “At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients.”
In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.
They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.
Trajectory to genocide
The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.
Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programs against what Israel calls its “delegitimization” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.
He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organizations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.
But there is more. Leading rights organizations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.
The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalized its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettos.
Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.
Mad Max vision
Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.
Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee wrote to the new defense minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.
It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.
Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.
Where does this lead?
Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving UNRWA out of the enclave.
Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.
It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “UNRWA does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation program, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.
This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylization” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.
Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Cover story
The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organizations to pretend otherwise.
They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.
Those fictions are unraveling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.
So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.
They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.
This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretense of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.
No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.
The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.
Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorized, like the other inmates.
Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.
Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.
The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.
 
 A crowd of Palestinians holding up their ID cards are forced to pass through an Israeli army checkpoint near Jabalia at gunpoint. (Photo: Social Media)
A crowd of Palestinians holding up their ID cards are forced to pass through an Israeli army checkpoint near Jabalia at gunpoint. (Photo: Social Media) 
January 9, 2025
Noor Alyacoubi
In northern Gaza, where Israeli checkpoints have become sites of terror and humiliation, everyone fears the moment he might end up face to face with an Israeli soldier. Being forced to strip naked under the gaze of a sniper is a nightmare that has become a recurring reality for Palestinian men. For Mahmoud, 24, and his father Osama, 50, that moment came after enduring over 450 days of starvation, relentless bombardment, and repeated displacement.
“When I first approached the checkpoint, an Israeli soldier yelled at me, grabbed my hat, and threw it to the ground. I stayed calm. I had to stay calm, knowing any reaction could endanger my life.” Mahmoud told Mondoweiss, recounting the harrowing moment of his forced displacement from Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, in November.
Their ordeal was part of a systematic Israeli campaign to empty Jabalia, a densely packed refugee camp in northern Gaza. Once a vibrant community, Jabalia has become the epicenter of devastation in Israel’s war on Gaza, its streets reduced to rubble and its residents forced to flee. Since October 5, 2024, when Israeli forces staged a large-scale advance into northern Gaza, thousands of families like Mahmoud’s have faced the agonizing choice between leaving everything behind or risking death.
For Mahmoud, leaving was not just the loss of home, but a surrender of dignity. His journey to the checkpoint was the culmination of weeks of survival under relentless airstrikes, dwindling supplies, with no place to hide. “They destroyed our lives and stripped us of our humanity,” he said.
‘This is the end’
Since the beginning of the Jabalia attack, Osama, a longtime resident of the camp, believed the Israeli military’s ultimate goal was to empty northern Gaza of Palestinians. “He knew we would never be able to come back,” his son Mahmoud said. “And he refused to make it easy for them.”
Despite his conviction to stay, Osama prioritized his family’s safety. On October 7, 2024 — a year after the war began, and just two days after the Israeli attack on Jabalia intensified — he urged his wife, two younger sons, eldest daughter, and three grandchildren to flee to western Gaza City.
Mahmoud, his eldest son, refused to leave. “I agreed with my younger brother that he would go with my mother, and I would stay with my father,” Mahmoud explained. “I couldn’t leave him alone.”
The pair moved from their fourth-floor apartment to Mahmoud’s grandmother’s abandoned ground-floor home, hoping it would offer better protection from the relentless Israeli bombardments. Safety, however, remained an illusion. Bombs rained down incessantly, artillery thundered in the streets, and stepping outside meant risking death by sniper or quadcopter strikes. Supplies dwindled. “We would hear injured people calling for help, but no one dared to enter the street, fearing sniper fire,” Mahmoud remembered.
As the situation worsened, with tanks advancing under cover of heavy artillery fire, Osama and Mahmoud fled their home on October 15 to Osama’s in-laws’ abandoned house in an area known as the Beit Lahia project. “We moved to another area in Jabalia, escaping tanks and enduring constant bombings,” Mahmoud recalled. Though the area was slightly removed from immediate fighting, danger was ever-present.
The father and son relied on the rations they had secured before the escalation for their survival. Markets were closed, and humanitarian aid was blocked. They had only essentials — rice, beans, and canned food. Cooking during the day and remaining silent at night became their routine. “At night, the only sounds were explosions,” Mahmoud said. Water was an even greater challenge. Fortunately, Osama had stocked water at his in-laws’ house before the assault, a foresight that saved them. Still, every drop had to be rationed.
Mahmoud and Osama had to evacuate again, spending a cold night out in the open without blankets, unsure of where to go. “Those days were the hardest of my life,” Mahmoud said. “I would fall asleep wondering if I’d wake up.”
After more than 45 days of relentless Israeli bombardment, Mahmoud and Osama eventually had no choice but to leave Jabalia altogether. The once-bustling community of Jabalia was now fragmented and desolate. Many neighbors had fled or been killed. Those who stayed behind were hiding in the ruins, sharing what little they had when they could. “We all became ghosts in our own neighborhood,” Mahmoud said. “Every sound, every movement felt like it could be the last.”
“Our neighbors encouraged us. They were also planning to leave the next day,” Mahmoud said. “They had mothers and wives, and we wanted to give them our phones and clothes to pass through,” as Israeli soldiers were less likely to strip-search women and seize their belongings.
“We left everything behind — our home, our belongings, and most painfully, my father’s sewing machines, which were our livelihood.”
On November 20, Mahmoud and Osama walked through the alleys of Jabalia camp, heading to the Israeli military checkpoint along Salah al-Din Street, the main road linking northern and southern Gaza. The checkpoint, guarded by Israeli soldiers, was a site of chaos and humiliation.
The soldiers ordered men to strip naked to undergo body searches. “I stood in line with 300 men, naked, holding up my ID,” Mahmoud said.
For six hours, Mahmoud and Osama stood in the cold surrounded by tanks, dust creeping into their eyes and lungs. The 300 men only had 20 liters of water to share among themselves. Some detainees were arbitrarily beaten or arrested, while others were not allowed to take anything with them when they left — not even their clothes.
“At that moment, I thought: ‘This is the end,’” Mahmoud said. But he and his father were among the few who passed through. “Walking away felt like being born again,” Mahmoud reflected.
Despite being ordered to keep walking, Mahmoud and Osama retrieved their clothes when soldiers weren’t watching and continued on foot for 5-and-a-half kilometers (3.5 miles). Finally, they reunited with their family in western Gaza, exhausted and in complete disbelief that they had survived.
Families separated
Yet not everyone shared Mahmoud and Osama’s fate. Among those detained at the checkpoint was one of their neighbors, 60-year-old tailor Abu Mohammed.
For weeks, his wife, Umm Mohammed, and their family stayed in their home near Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, refusing to leave. “Where could we go?” Umm Mohammed asked. “Everywhere in Gaza is unsafe.”
But as the attacks escalated, their survival outweighed their fears. On the bitterly cold morning of December 2, Abu and Umm Mohammed, their two younger sons, Mahmoud and Ahmed, their daughter Malak, their daughter-in-law Aya, and their toddler grandchild fled their home, while their eldest son, Mohammed, stayed behind. A machine technician at Kamal Adwan hospital, Mohammed felt obligated to stay behind and care for the wounded. “I can’t leave,” he told his family.
They parted in tears, uncertain if they would meet again.
At the checkpoint, Umm Mohammed watched helplessly as the men were separated from the women. She, Malak, Aya, and the baby passed through, but spent hours waiting anxiously for her husband and sons. Eventually, Mahmoud and Ahmed arrived at their temporary shelter in Gaza City hours later — but Abu Mohammed was not with them.
“I didn’t know whether to smile because my sons were safe, or cry because my husband was taken,” she said. “My sons didn’t even know where their father was taken or what they did to him.”
On December 27, her eldest son Mohammed thankfully made his way to his family in Gaza City, after enduring horror in Kamal Adwan hospital, which was once again ruthlessly targeted by the Israeli military at the end of the year.
The Israeli army besieged the hospital for almost a week, preventing anyone from coming in or out and blocking the entry of food or water to those inside. On December 26, Israeli soldiers forcibly evacuated the hospital, dragging every doctor, worker, patient, and displaced person to a besieged school nearby. After hours of detention and humiliation, Mohammed and others were released.
“I felt that we could almost have lost Mohammed as well,” Umm Mohammed said. “But thank God, we have him in our house.”
More than a month has passed since Israeli soldiers detained Abu Mohammed. “We communicated with humanitarian organizations and the Red Crescent to see if they could give us any information about my husband, but no news has come out so far,” Umm Mohammed said. “We also tried to contact those recently released from Israeli prisons in case anyone had seen my husband, but all efforts have been in vain.”
 “He has no political ties,” Umm Mohammed insisted. “He’s spent his life sewing to support us.”
Abu Mohammed is one of dozens — if not hundreds or thousands— of Palestinian men detained arbitrarily since the beginning of the war. Though there is no official confirmation of the specific number of Palestinians detained and kidnapped by Israeli forces in Gaza since the October 2024, Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer estimates that at least 10,400 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, the majority of whom are held incommunicado in conditions that human rights groups have denounced as “horrifying.”
Despite the uncertainty, Umm Mohammed clings to hope. “I still pray that tomorrow, I’ll wake up to hear him knocking on the door,” she said.

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