In the early hours of December 27, 2024, the walls of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza shook as Israeli forces dropped bombs nearby. By sunrise, bulldozers had flattened the earth leading to the entrance and Israeli tanks were closing in. Snipers surrounded the complex. Inside, 350 patients, doctors, nurses and their families huddled in the hallways.
“I thought it was the last day of my life,” Abdel Moneim Al-Shrafi, a nurse in his early twenties, told Al Jazeera’s documentary program Fault Lines.
At around 6 a.m., a voice from a quadcopter hovering over the hospital summoned Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the acting director of the Kamal Adwan Medical Complex. His wife of more than 30 years, Albina, watched as he climbed through rubble to reach an Israeli tank a block away. “He went to them in his white coat,” she said. “He was going to them confident that he had not done anything wrong.”
A photo of Dr. Abu Safiya approaching the tank has become an iconic symbol of Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza—and of Palestinian resilience. He returned to the hospital shortly afterwards. By nightfall, Kamal Adwan had been emptied and shut down by the Israeli military. Dr. Abu Safiya and all the men inside were detained.
Dr. Abu Safiya has been in Israeli custody ever since without formal charge or trial in inhumane conditions.
That raid marked the final act in an 80-day siege on Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last standing hospital in northern Gaza. Dr. Abu Safiya became its acting director early in 2024 after its previous director was detained in another raid and the hospital was temporarily closed. “Dr. Hussam felt it was impossible not to have a hospital in the north,” said Rawiya Tanboura, 32, a nurse who had worked with him since 2019. “I think he was afraid that every person that would die in the north would die because he left.” Much of the hospital had been destroyed, but Dr. Abu Safiya reconvened what remained of its staff and reopened it.
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