logo
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is in critical condition following torture and starvation in Israeli prison

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is in critical condition following torture and starvation in Israeli prison

Middle East Eye15-07-2025
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, a paeditrican and former director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza who was detained by Israel, is in critical condiiton, Middle East Monitor reported on Monday.
Since he was detained by Israeli forces without charge in December and put into the notorious Ofer prison in Israel, he has lost nearly half of his body weight his lawyer Ghaid Ghanem Qassem said due to forced starvation.
He was severely beaten on 24 June, his lawyer said, and sustained injuries to his rib cage, face, head, and neck.
Dr Abu Safiya is currently suffering from high blood pressure and a heart condition but has been denied medication or access to specialist medical care by Israeli prison authorities.
Qassem said he was being held in solitary confinement in an underground cell, where the sun does not enter, as well as enduring torture.
Qassem added that glasses that were delivered to Dr Abu Safiya were deliberately broken.
Chairman of the Euro-Med human rights monitor Ramy Abdu visited Dr Abu Safiya on 9 July, and reported that he was being held in harrowing conditions.
The Israeli military has disproportionately targeted health workers since its war began.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

More aid needed to tackle famine-like conditions in Gaza, says WFP
More aid needed to tackle famine-like conditions in Gaza, says WFP

Dubai Eye

time34 minutes ago

  • Dubai Eye

More aid needed to tackle famine-like conditions in Gaza, says WFP

A long-term steady supply of aid is needed to counter the worsening hunger crisis in Gaza, UN agencies said on Monday after mounting pressure prompted Israel to ease restrictions in the Palestinian enclave. Israel carried out an air drop and announced a series of measures over the weekend, including daily humanitarian pauses in three areas of Gaza and new safe corridors for aid convoys, after images of starving children alarmed the world. On Monday, the Gaza health ministry said at least 14 people had died in the past 24 hours of starvation and malnutrition, bringing the war's death toll from hunger to 147, including 89 children, most in just the last few weeks. The World Food Programme said 60 trucks of aid had been dispatched but that this amount fell short of Gaza's needs. "Sixty is definitely not enough. So our target at the moment, every day is to get 100 trucks into Gaza," WFP Regional Director for the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, Samer Abdel Jaber, told Reuters. The WFP said that almost 470,000 people in Gaza are enduring famine-like conditions, with 90,000 women and children in need of specialist nutrition treatments. "I cannot say that in a week we will be able to really avert the risks. It has to be something continuous and scalable," Abdel Jaber said. LOOTING Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said aid supply would be kept up whether Israel was negotiating a ceasefire or fighting in Gaza. The WFP said it has 170,000 metric tonnes of food in the region, outside Gaza, which would be enough to feed the whole population for the next three months if it gets the clearance to bring into the enclave. COGAT, the Israeli military aid coordination agency, said that over 120 trucks were distributed in Gaza on Sunday by the UN and international organisations. But some of those trucks that made it into Gaza were seized by desperate Palestinians, and some by armed looters, witnesses said. "Currently aid comes for the strong who can race ahead, who can push others and grab a box or a sack of flour. That chaos must be stopped and protection for those trucks must be allowed," said Emad, 58, who used to own a wood factory in Gaza City. More aid was expected to flow in on Monday. Qatar said in a statement it had sent 49 trucks that arrived in Egypt en route for Gaza. Jordan and the UAE airdropped supplies into Gaza. Israel cut off aid to Gaza from the start of March in what it said was a means to pressure Hamas into giving up dozens of hostages it still holds, and reopened aid with new restrictions in May. Israel says it abides by international law but must prevent aid from being diverted by militants, and blames Hamas for the suffering of Gaza's people. "Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bald-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza," Netanyahu said on Sunday. He added that with the newly announced measures, it was up to the UN to deliver the aid. United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said on Sunday that some movement restrictions appeared to have been eased by Israel. A senior WFP official said on Sunday that the agency needs quick approvals by Israel for its trucks to move into Gaza if it is to take advantage of the humanitarian pauses in fighting.

UK urged to move fast after PM signs off on receiving wounded Gaza children
UK urged to move fast after PM signs off on receiving wounded Gaza children

Middle East Eye

time2 hours ago

  • Middle East Eye

UK urged to move fast after PM signs off on receiving wounded Gaza children

A British organisation bringing children from Gaza to the United Kingdom for medical treatment has called on the UK government to "urgently operationalise" a plan to bring 30 wounded children after the prime minister announced further evacuations late on Friday. In a recorded video, Keir Starmer said that the UK had "put millions of pounds of aid into Gaza", including an extra £40m this year, but "that help is not getting in". "So we are scaling up our work. We are accelerating efforts to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance, bringing them to the UK for specialist medical treatment," he said. Starmer's comments were welcomed by the UK-based Project Pure Hope (PPH), which brought the first two - and, so far, the only - Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK for treatment earlier this year in partnership with the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. The two girls, Rama, 12, and Ghena, five, came to the UK from Egypt with congenital conditions and have been receiving life-saving treatment in the private wings of leading London hospitals, funded entirely by charitable donations. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Over a month ago, PPH asked the government to help facilitate and fund a cohort of 20-40 acutely ill and suffering children to come directly from Gaza to the UK, and had been awaiting a decision. Now, with Starmer's sign off, PPH is urging the government to move quickly, saying it has already paved the way for such evacuations with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Israeli and Jordanian authorities, and could activate its plan to bring the group of children immediately. "Time is of the essence," said Omar Din, one of PPH's co-founders. "Every day of delay risks the lives and futures of children who deserve a chance to recover and rebuild." MPs pressure government Starmer's announcement came after nearly three dozen cross-party MPs called on the government to help facilitate legal pathways and also help with the costs for Palestinian children coming to the UK for treatment. The WHO estimates that at least 12,000 adults and children need to leave Gaza for specialised care. With a short list of countries willing to take them and Israeli authorities limiting those permitted to leave the enclave, aid workers and doctors say people are dying before they can get out. One major obstacle to bring Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK for medical treatment has been the difficulty in obtaining visas that require biometrics. The UK closed its only authorised biometric registration centre in Gaza in October 2023, leaving the nearest visa applications centres in Egypt and Jordan. In a 25 July letter to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, the MPs recalled the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani campaigner for girl's education, who received life-saving surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in 2012, four days after she was shot by the Taliban. Children will die quickly amid 'genocidal starvation' in Gaza, warns top famine expert Read More » The MPs, led by Labour's Sam Rushworth and including International Development Committee chair Sarah Champion, said the precedent "demonstrates what can be achieved with international co-ordination and political will". "If the government is not willing to defer biometric registration until arrival in the UK, we exhort you to work with the WHO, COGAT and the Jordanian government to secure passage to the consulate in Amman, where the relevant biomatrics check can be done prior to flying to the UK," they wrote. The MPs also raised the question of funding. With National Health Services facilites used, the government would apply the NHS tariff plus 150 percent surchage, meaning "costs can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds per patient", they said. They noted the role the UK had played in supporting just under half a million people to receive essential healthcare in Gaza and funding a polio vaccine campaign. "Could [Official Development Assistance] not be used to likewise support life-saving health care 'at cost' in the UK? Paediatric specialists around the UK stand ready to help," they wrote. "From the 669 children rescued by Sir Nicolas Winton on the Kindertransport 86 years ago, to the more recent Home for Ukraine scheme, the British people expect our country to play our part." Din told MEE that, in order to get started with bringing the group of children, his organisation is waiting for the government to confirm details, including funding and timing. MEE asked the Foreign Office on Monday when the government planned to start evacuating the children from Gaza, if it would allocate funding for their treatment, and whether their evacuations would be organised through a scheme like the one for the Ukrainians, but did not receive an immediate answer. On Tuesday, Din is scheduled to travel to Cairo to pick up Majd, the third child that PPH will bring to the UK for private medical treatment. "Whilst the UK scheme is getting off the ground, we carry on with our privately funded work," he said.

Gaza famine: We hold British institutions accountable for enabling this horror
Gaza famine: We hold British institutions accountable for enabling this horror

Middle East Eye

time3 hours ago

  • Middle East Eye

Gaza famine: We hold British institutions accountable for enabling this horror

I am a British-Egyptian paediatrician. I have travelled to Gaza for over a decade, working alongside local doctors and witnessing first-hand the impact of Israel's blockade and bombardment on children's health. I know what it means to see preventable child death. But I have never in my lifetime witnessed this level of calculated cruelty, nor such cold complicity from those who claim to care about international law and children's rights. For the past few days, the faces of starving children in Gaza have flooded the pages of British newspapers: emaciated infants with hollow eyes, toddlers too weak to cry, babies dying in their mothers' arms. It is as if the UK media suddenly discovered that children are being starved in Gaza. But for those of us who work with children, who have spoken daily with doctors inside Gaza, who have begged governments and institutions to act for the last nine months, this horror is not news. It is the inevitable outcome of a deliberate campaign of dehumanisation - sanctioned by the British mainstream media, shielded by the British government and carried out by an apartheid state with total impunity. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Media complicity The images now shocking the nation did not appear in a vacuum. They are the final chapter of a story that the UK media has helped write from the beginning. Now that children are starving to death on camera, the very same outlets have begun to backtrack - not out of principle, but self-preservation For 20 months - and especially since October 2023 - British newspapers, broadcasters and politicians have regurgitated Israeli government talking points almost verbatim: human shields, terrorist infrastructure, no famine, Hamas is hiding food, Israel is doing its best. Every excuse has been offered to rationalise the collective punishment of two million people - half of them children. These narratives were not harmless. They built the scaffolding of disbelief that allowed genocide to unfold before our eyes. They gave cover to Israeli war crimes. They undermined the testimonies of Palestinian doctors, UN officials, human rights experts and ordinary civilians begging to be believed. They manufactured public consent for ethnic cleansing. Now that children are starving to death on camera, the very same outlets have begun to backtrack - not out of principle, but self-preservation. The tide of public opinion has turned. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide. The World Health Organization warns of catastrophic hunger. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef) says Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Faced with overwhelming evidence, British institutions are scrambling to rewrite their role. But we must not let them. Institutional racism We must remember how British editors platformed Israeli spokespeople while silencing Palestinian medics; how papers like The Times and The Telegraph printed baseless stories about tunnels under hospitals, smearing paediatric units as terrorist command centres; how some columnists questioned whether Palestinians really lacked food or were staging the suffering. How the BBC obscures UK complicity in Gaza genocide Read More » We must remember that while Gaza's healthcare system collapsed under relentless bombing, our own medical bodies stayed largely silent - too afraid of controversy to speak against the starvation of children. And we must call this what it is: racism. It should never have taken visible bones and distended bellies to convince British journalists that Palestinians are human beings. The starvation of children is not more tragic now because it is photogenic; it is tragic because it was always avoidable and always justified only because of who those children were. Would this be happening if they were Israeli children? Ukrainian children? British children? Of course not. But Palestinian lives, and especially Palestinian children, have been treated as disposable - either invisible or demonised. For months, Israeli officials openly stated their intent to deprive Gaza of food, fuel, water and medicine. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said they were fighting "human animals". Senior politicians called for a second Nakba. And yet, the UK media pretended not to hear. We have colleagues in Gaza who told me in March 2025 that they had nothing left to eat. They were performing surgery without anaesthetic, feeding their children boiled grass, watching infants die of dehydration and wasting. We relayed these accounts to journalists, to international agencies, to professional bodies here in Britain. But too often they wanted "balance". They wanted to wait for "independent verification". They would quote an Israeli military spokesperson, but not a Palestinian paediatrician who just watched three babies die. This is what racism looks like in institutional form: the demand for impossible evidence from the colonised, while treating every word of the coloniser as fact. Moment of reckoning The images now flooding our media are not a turning point; they are a reckoning. Because it is not just Israel that is starving these children; it is the UK government that continues to arm Israel, host its war criminals and block calls for a ceasefire. The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system; it is the system - a system that deems some lives worth mourning and others worth erasing It is every editor who played stenographer to Israel's occupation. It is every medical institution that remained neutral while Gaza hospitals were bombed. It is every British leader who repeats the lie that this is a war between equals. The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system; it is the system - a system that deems some lives worth mourning and others worth erasing, a system that needs to be torn down, not rebranded. So yes, show the images. Show the world what has been done. But do not look away from the people and structures that made this possible. Demand accountability - not just from Israel, but from every British institution that enabled this horror. As a paediatrician, I swore an oath to protect life. That means speaking out when children are starved to death with the world's approval. That means confronting the racism at the heart of this silence. And that means ensuring that those now weeping for Gaza's children never again have the power to decide who lives and who dies. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store