In December 2024, a photograph spread around the world. A doctor in a white coat walked alone across the rubble of northern Gaza, towards an Israeli tank. He had stayed in his hospital to the very end, treating children while the Israeli military closed in around him. That doctor was Dr Hussam Abu Safiya , a paediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital. It was one of the last times the world would see him as a free man.
More than 540 days later, he is still in prison. He has never been charged. He has never stood trial. He is held under Israel's " Unlawful Combatants Law ", a statute that permits indefinite detention without charge and strips those it captures of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
When he appeared before Israel's Supreme Court by video link on 10 June 2026, it was the first image of him in months — and one many of us could hardly bear to see. The charismatic doctor who had walked so calmly towards that tank was now gaunt and hollowed, shackled at the wrists, bearing the visible marks of torture: drastic weight loss, untreated illness, his glasses confiscated, months in solitary confinement and beatings.
His son Ibrahim was killed during the siege of the hospital, where he refused to leave. Through his lawyer, he gave the court one steady message — that he is a paediatrician who cares for the sick and the wounded, and that his detention is unjust and arbitrary.
And he is not an exception. He is one of fourteen Gazan doctors held without charge, and one of more than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza imprisoned under the same law — part of a detainee population numbering in the thousands, many of whom describe the same beatings, the same starvation, the same disappearance into cells where the days have no names. What is being done to Dr Abu Safiya in full view of the world is being done to thousands more in the dark. His is simply the face we can see.
Israel's military claims Dr Abu Safiya held a rank in Hamas. In eighteen months, it has produced no charge, no evidence, no trial. Last week, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected his appeal behind closed doors, on "confidential" intelligence that neither he nor his lawyers may see and that will never be published. When even the editors of Haaretz, Israel's oldest newspaper, write that the state must indict him or release him, you know the secrecy is not an accident. It is the point.
A charge would require proof. Proof would invite scrutiny. And scrutiny is the one thing his captors cannot allow. Because Dr Abu Safiya is not only a doctor. He is a witness — to the siege of Kamal Adwan , to the bombing of its wards, to children dying for want of oxygen and medicine. Physicians for Human Rights Israel, who represent the Gazan doctors still held without charge, have named the reason plainly: the state is afraid of the testimony these men carry, and of the stories they will one day tell.
This is what the targeting of health workers is for. Kill the doctor, or cage the doctor, and the evidence is buried with them. Almost 2,000 health workers have been killed in Gaza; every death erases a witness. Systemic silencing I have spent more than a decade travelling to Gaza, teaching medics alongside colleagues like Dr Abu Safiya. For the past two years, I have spoken with friends there almost every day. I do not write about this from a distance; these are names, faces and voice notes that fill my nights.
But the machinery of silencing does not stop at Gaza's borders. The first formal complaint of my career came not for anything I did to a patient, but for helping organise an event raising funds for Gaza's health workers. Across Britain , doctors and nurses have been reported to their employers and the General Medical Council for calling for a ceasefire. Doctors arrested in their own homes. And Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah — the British-Palestinian surgeon who operated on the wounded in Gaza — was cleared of every misconduct charge by the GMC's own independent tribunal in January, only for the regulator to announce it would appeal that verdict to the High Court: overruling its own tribunal, using a power it is itself due to lose later this year. A surgeon, comprehensively exonerated, was dragged back through the courts for the crime of speaking out.
The methods could not look more different — bombs and prison cells in Gaza, tribunals and investigations in London. But the aim is the same: to make health workers afraid to testify to what they have seen. Fear kills medicine just as surely as bombs destroy hospitals.
It is precisely because the goal is silence that solidarity works. Dr Abu Safiya cannot know the world is calling his name — but his captors do, and so do the governments that could press for his release. Pressure is the only currency that has ever freed a prisoner held without charge.
So say his name, publicly and often. Write to your MP and demand that the UK government raise his case directly with Israel. Write to the Royal Colleges, the British Medical Association and the GMC, and ask why they have not done what the American Academy of Paediatrics already has — formally demanded his release. Support the organisations fighting for him and his colleagues: Physicians for Human Rights, Al-Mezan, and Legal Action Worldwide. And join us at Health Workers 4 Palestine, where no health worker who speaks out should ever have to stand alone.
A profession that will not defend its own when they are imprisoned for healing has forgotten what it is for. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya stayed with his patients when it would have been easier, and safer, to leave. His steadfastness is on trial in a court that will not show its evidence. The least we owe him is to refuse to let him disappear.
Say his name. Demand his release. And do not look away. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan is a British-Egyptian paediatric neurologist based in London. Since 2011, he has participated in numerous medical and teaching delegations to Gaza and the West Bank. He is the founder and president of Health Workers 4 Palestine, a global grassroots movement of health professionals and allies advocating for the right to health and the end of the illegal occupation of Palestine. Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com Opinions expressed in this video article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author's employer.