Healthcare workers and allies rally in support
of Palestinians and to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and all
Palestinian healthcare workers in Israeli jails as they gather in New York,
United States on January 6, 2025. (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty
Images)
The
American Medical Association Is Failing to Speak Up for Dr. Abu Safiya
If they speak out to save just one
Palestinian doctor’s life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other
prisoners.
Apr 10,
2026
April 11, 2026Israel tortured a 1-year-old baby.
They burned him with cigarettes and drove nails through his feet as a form of torture during his father’s interrogation.
This isn’t some twisted, made-up movie scene; this is real life. And it’s the
one case we know of right now, but who knows how many other babies, in all
their innocence, have been tortured by the Israeli military? It also begs the
question: Since they’re willing to do this to an infant, what are they doing to
older prisoners?
It’s always been clear that the Zionist settler colony
will go to any length to achieve its goal of being an ethnostate. To achieve
this goal, it subjects Palestinians to mass-imprisonment campaigns. No
title—child, teenager, mother, father, health professional, aid worker—is
spared from the Israeli prison system. Because if Israel can’t just outright
exterminate all Palestinians at once, the next best option is to round them up
and slowly kill them behind bars. Well, that was the case before March 30,
2026, when the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that calls for the hanging of
Palestinian prisoners within 90 days of being convicted of killing Israeli settlers.
The bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been wearing noose pins and
carrying around a physical noose to publicly show his excitement for
potentially becoming Israel’s official executioner. When the vote was called
out and the bill was passed, Ben-Gvir popped champagne bottles with his
cronies, celebrating the essence of killing more Palestinians.
These are illegal settlers under international law, who have been terrorizing
Palestinian villagers for years, their attacks becoming increasingly frequent
and heinous. Palestinians have had their houses set on fire while inside them
at the hands of these settlers, backed by the state. It is important to remember
that the Israeli military courts operate outside of constitutional processes
and have been widely condemned for their human rights abuses. In these courts, Palestinians
have a conviction rate of over 96%, most often for crimes they never even
committed.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the
institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers
being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured.
Israel promotes its interests by incentivizing settlers to
brutalize Palestinians and destroy their land. And now, after systematically
denying Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, they are branding them as
cattle to be killed by hanging. Israel is carrying out its genocide in the form of codified law. This is the
true face of the settler colonial state of Israel: dehumanization to the lowest
level.
Right now, Israel is holding the highest number of
Palestinian prisoners ever recorded. One such prisoner is Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya. He was the sole lead of the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. For the “crime” of providing
medical aid to Palestinians, he was surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers
and forced into imprisonment in December 2024.
Israeli society is getting more and more draconian: no
prosecution, no unanimity, nothing. Simply put, if the Israeli military sees
fit to kill a Palestinian prisoner, they will do so. Dr. Abu Safiya has been in
an Israeli prison for 16 months, and there is speculation that he is being
tortured. But again, if they can torture an infant, what’s a middle-aged man to
them? The new Israeli bill gives the IOF a pathway to execute prisoners like
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: torturing them to force a confession, convicting them,
and then hanging them. Clearly, he’s been deemed a threat to the very existence
of Israel because he helped save the lives of Palestinians.
This is the situation of medical professionals outside of
the West, heroes who put everything on the line to provide care for their
people. In comparison to the most “esteemed” doctors in the US—like those
within the American Medical Association, with all their prestige and shiny
titles—the healthcare workers subjected to deadly imperialist brutality
deserve our recognition, and they urgently need our help.
You might be thinking, “What does the American Medical
Association have to do with a detained Palestinian doctor?” Firstly, we need to
contend with the fact that it is our US tax dollars that fund these genocidal
soldiers, prisons, and
policies that got Dr. Abu Safiya arrested in the first place. The American
government and its institutions are just as guilty of the oppression of the
Palestinian as the Israelis are. We need to stop operating on willful ignorance
because it has cost thousands of lives in the region, a tally that is
increasing by the second with the recent attacks on Iran and Lebanon.
Secondly, the American Medical Association (AMA) prides
itself on its strong relationship with the World Medical Association, which has
already called for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya, demonstrating alignment with
its policies that “support the rights of physicians worldwide.” The advocacy of
foreign doctors is integral to the AMA as a whole. Why is a Palestinian doctor
being ignored by them, then? Maybe the topic of genocide is too taboo for them.
That would be ironic if so, when a genocide is the culmination of healthcare
sectors being destroyed, lineages lost, and eugenics shaping a land and people
forever. These are topics any medical association should be speaking about,
especially one that represents the literal country that enabled this violence.
Imagine the leverage the AMA could have in the halls of Congress when
advocating for change.
The recent codification of the execution of Palestinian
prisoners poses a grave threat to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s life. Will the AMA
finally act now, in the face of such injustice and wickedness? If they speak
out to save just one doctor’s life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of
other prisoners.
The genocide in Gaza has shown me that so much of what I thought
about society was false. I once believed I lived in a world where good
prevails, but I have come to realize that selective empathy is the rule. The
leaders of this world don’t hold empathy for anything or anyone that stands in
their way of global domination. I frequently think of how many lives have been
lost at the hands of US-Israeli imperial violence. The sheer number of
casualties in Gaza, despite being predicted to be in the hundreds of thousands,
has never been enough reason to stop. I think of how one of the first targets
in the US war on Iran was a girl’s elementary school, which they targeted with
not just one strike, but three in a row.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the
institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers
being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured. At this
point, advocating for the release of our prisoners who were wrongfully detained
is the least we can do.
Our work
is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish
and share widely.
Jenin is CODEPINK’s Palestine
campaigner. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from the
University of Illinois at Chicago in December of 2023. For over five years,
Jenin has been a community organizer and dedicated individual focused on the
Palestinian movement through advocacy, digital storytelling, and grassroots
mobilization. She is a firm believer in intertwined struggle and liberation for
all.
Donations can be
sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt.
206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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