TEHRAN - Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza until he was detained by Israeli forces, is fearing for his life.

Abu Safiya is being held for 18 months without charge or trial. He was unbelievably detained in December 2024 along with other medical staff and patients.

Rights groups and his family say he shows signs of having been regularly tortured.

Abu Safiya, a pediatrician, was a prominent voice highlighting Gaza’s decimated healthcare sector and continued to work despite the death of one of his sons in an Israeli drone strike.

The psychological and physical torture of a physician, whose only crime was to treat the Palestinians subjected to relentless slaughters in Gaza, is enough to indict Israel.

While Israel behaves so savagely against a prominent physician, imagine what it does against ordinary Palestinians held in captivity. Those Western countries that still back Israel despite all these horrific acts should be ashamed of themselves.

“The details emerging about the deteriorating conditions of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s detention are truly horrifying. We are deeply alarmed by the reports from his lawyer indicating that his life is at imminent risk amidst his ongoing unlawful detention. It is unconscionable that a pediatrician, who has dedicated his life to saving others in the occupied Gaza Strip, is being subjected to torture and other ill-treatment – including severe physical and psychological abuse and prolonged solitary confinement – while being detained without any justification,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns at Amnesty International.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Israel’s actions violated multiple articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The UN rights body added that Abu Safiya’s case was one of many it has investigated and “may indicate a widespread or systematic practice of arbitrary detention” in Israel.

Nasser Odeh, his lawyer, says Abu Safiya is almost unrecognizable because of severe injuries inflicted in Israeli detention. The lawyer says the doctor is facing “tangible danger to his life”.

Abu Safiya met his lawyer on 2 July, after a transfer to Israel’s notorious underground Rakefet prison in late June. He had difficulty breathing and speaking continuously. The lawyer said he was so weak that he struggled to sit upright, and repeatedly seemed on the verge of losing consciousness.

“They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end,” Odeh quoted him as saying, in a joint statement with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), who along with other organizations, are calling for his release.

His detention is part of a broader pattern of Israeli attacks on healthcare across occupied Palestine, said Milena Ansari, PHRI’s director for the area.

Abu Safiya had become the face of health workers struggling to treat patients throughout the war in Gaza before his detention. He is being held indefinitely, along with thousands of other Palestinian civilians, in prisons that Israeli rights groups say have become torture camps.

In late May, he was transferred from Ketziot prison to the Ganot prison complex and put in solitary confinement without explanation, Odeh said.

Abu Safiya described an attack there by guards using hammers and batons, shortly after appearing via video link at a supreme court appeal hearing challenging his detention. He was then moved to the Rakefet facility on June 24, where Odeh noted a severe and dangerous deterioration in his condition.

“I have visited Dr Abu Safiya several times since his detention, but the individual I encountered during this latest visit was not the same person I had previously met,” Odeh said on July 5, calling for an immediate independent medical examination. ‘‘His physical and psychological state, the severe injuries visible on his body, and his personal testimony leave no room for doubt: his life is in immediate danger.”

Abu Safiya appeared frightened, distressed and reluctant to speak freely in the meeting, Odeh said, but told his lawyer that he was subjected to daily beatings in the Rakefet jail, and had lost consciousness several times as a result.

Rakefet, where prisoners never see daylight, was built in the 1980s to hold senior organized crime figures before being closed on the grounds it was inhumane. It was reopened on the orders of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Other Palestinians detained there reported feeling breathless and choking in the unventilated, overcrowded cells, even without injuries like those sustained by Abu Safiya.

An Israel prison service spokesperson said allegations made by Odeh were “false and entirely without factual basis”, but declined to comment on Abu Safiya’s health, citing privacy concerns.

Guevara Rosas from Amnesty International also said it is utterly reprehensible that a doctor who refused to abandon his patients, and who became one of the most prominent voices denouncing the devastation of Gaza’s healthcare system, remains arbitrarily and unlawfully detained under Israel’s baseless designation as an “unlawful combatant”.

History will neither forget nor forgive Israel for imprisoning and torturing even Palestinian physicians who treated people sustaining severe injuries in Israeli attacks.