PARIS: About 50 people, including doctors, trade unionists and pro-Palestinian activists, gathered outside France’s Foreign Ministry in Paris to call for the release of a Gaza hospital director who has been held since December 2024.
“Free Dr. Abu Safiya,” chanted the demonstrators at the protest organized by hospital unions, including Patrick Pelloux, the high-profile head of France’s emergency doctors’ association.
It is the latest call for the release of Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, who has reportedly suffered torture and life-threatening injuries in detention.
FASTFACT
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, has reportedly suffered torture and life-threatening injuries in Israeli detention.
UN experts, the World Health Organization, and Amnesty International have urged Israel to set him free.
Israel has said his detention is “lawful” and rejected reports that he suffered a life-threatening condition. Abu Safiya rose to prominence in 2024 by posting about the dire conditions in his besieged hospital in Beit Lahia during a major Israeli offensive.
On Dec. 27 that year, Israeli forces assaulted the facility, labeling the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza at the time a Hamas “terrorist center,” and arresting dozens of medical staff, including Abu Safiya.
The demonstrators want a non-political medical delegation to be sent to assess Abu Safiya’s “state of health” and prevent “his arbitrary detention from becoming a death sentence,” said Cyrille Venet, former general secretary of the SNMH-FO union. In October, a ceasefire was reached in Gaza between Israel and Hamas following two years of war, which was sparked by the Palestinian militants’ unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society has stated that the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the detention of Dr. Abu Safiya served as a stark illustration of the policy of arbitrary detention imposed on thousands of detainees from the Gaza Strip and still affecting hundreds held in Israeli prisons and military camps under the so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law.”
The society said that the law has been transformed into a legal tool for entrenching open-ended detention outside the basic guarantees of justice and international law.
It added that the Supreme Court’s decision is part of a long series of rulings that reflect the extent of complicity within the Israeli judicial system in entrenching the ongoing genocidal policy targeting Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
