One hundred signers of an open letter organized by a Connecticut group are urging Israel to free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and all medical workers in their custody.
January 27 marked 13 months after the detention of Dr. Abu Safiya and other medical staff from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was taken to a number of Israeli prisons like the infamous Sde Teiman in the Negev Desert and Ofer Prison in the West Bank. He’s only had very sporadic meetings with an attorney. The last one was in August when he had a hearing of sorts and where the Israeli judge gave him six-months more in prison to allow him to be further investigated as an “Unlawful Combatant.”
After 13 months Israel has not released any evidence that Dr. Abu Safia is any kind of combatant. I’ve sent multiple emails to the Israeli consulate in Washington D.C. asking, “Why is he being held? When will he be released?” The emails received no answer.
Some of the open letter’s signers are quite well known like Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, Dr. Zaher Sahloul, founder of MedGlobal, Bill McKibben writer best known for his climate writings, Craig Mokhiber, International Human Rights lawyer, Ira Helfand who is past president of the Nobel Prize winning organization, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, refugee from Nazi Germany Lillian Rosengarten, Rabbi Brant Rosen, and writer Peter Beinart. They also include a number of doctors, artists, professors and several members of the Connecticut legislature.
The letter notes, “Abu Safiya had written several opinion pieces in the New York Times. In the last one, published three weeks before his arrest, the Times described him as the lead physician in Gaza for the humanitarian organization MedGlobal. He’s a pediatrician but a few days earlier he had to perform the first surgery of his life.”
The doctor wrote, ‘The human mind cannot imagine all the death and body parts and blood that surround us around the clock. But it remains our responsibility to keep on providing humanitarian services.”
The Connecticut organized “Campaign to Free Dr. Abu Safiya” was formed after he was awarded the Middle East Crisis Committee’s Courage Award in absentia in November of 2025. At the end of the ceremony a “Poster Shout Out” was held. At a subsequent meeting North Carolina doctor Mark Perlmutter and Gaza doctor Ali Tahrawi told in harrowing detail of Israeli military abuses.
On December 27 the group sponsored a Zoom reading of the last posts Dr. Abu Safiya wrote at the end of 2024. Eight readers told of his increasing peril and what he wrote on December 27, 2024 hours before he was forced to walk alone though blocks of rubble and into an Israeli tank.
This amazing man deserves our admiration, not miserable punishment for imaginary crimes.
Stanley Heller is Administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace which was founded in New Haven in 1952. He’s also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.