'Grave risk to his life': Israel is torturing Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in its notorious Sde Teiman dungeon

It's the same dungeon where the Israelis rape abducted Palestinians to death.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the Kamal Adwan Hospital director, who was last seen approaching two Israeli tanks in his medical gown as his hospital was set ablaze and put out of service by the Israeli genocidal forces, is reportedly being tortured in the notorious Sde Teiman dungeon run by the occupation in the Negev desert.

The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a report on January 3, detailing the inhuman treatment Dr. Abu Safiya was made to endure soon after his abduction, during his detention at a field interrogation site, and subsequently at the Sde Teiman dungeon.

The report adds that the doctor’s health has deteriorated as a result of the indignities being visited upon him by the Israeli regime and warns of “grave risk to his life”:

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has received information that Dr. Abu Safiya’s health has deteriorated due to the torture he endured during his detention, particularly while being held at the Sde Teyman military base in southern Israel. Euro-Med Monitor warns of the grave risk to his life, following patterns of deliberate killings and deaths under torture previously suffered by other doctors and medical staff arrested from Gaza since October 2023.

Euro-Med Monitor has documented testimonies confirming that Israeli soldiers physically assaulted Dr. Abu Safiya immediately after he left the hospital on Friday, 27 December 2024. He was then directly targeted with sound bombs while attempting to evacuate the hospital in compliance with orders from the Israeli army.

According to testimonies gathered by Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli army subsequently transferred Dr. Abu Safiya to a field interrogation site in the Al-Fakhura area of Jabalia Refugee Camp. There, he was forced to strip off his clothes and was subjected to severe beatings, including being whipped with a thick wire commonly used for street electrical wiring. Soldiers deliberately humiliated him in front of other detainees, including fellow medical staff. He was later taken to an undisclosed location before being transferred to the Sde Teyman military camp under Israeli army control.

The report cites testimonies from recently released detainees, who witnessed the treatment meted out to Dr. Abu Safiya at the torture camp:

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has also received information from recently released detainees at the Sde Teyman military camp, confirming that Dr. Abu Safiya was subjected to severe torture, leading to a significant deterioration in his health. This occurred despite him already being injured by Israeli air strikes on the hospital, where he worked tirelessly until the facility was stormed and set ablaze by Israeli forces.

Interestingly, the Israeli occupation had feigned ignorance about his whereabouts and arrest. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report adds, “Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI) submitted a request on behalf of Dr. Abu Safiya’s family to obtain information and facilitate a lawyer’s visit on 2 January 2024. However, the Israeli authorities claimed to have no record of his detention, stating they had no indication of his arrest.”

A couple of days later, however, the Israeli occupation forced acknowledged that they were holding the doctor, but didn’t say where.

Credit: Anadolu Agency

Labelled as Israel’s Guantanamo Bay — after the United States’ notorious torture dungeon in Cuba —Sde Teiman has been the site of some of the worst detainee abuses since October 7, 2023. Islam al-Sarsawi, 42, from the Shujaiyya neighbourhood in north Gaza, was raped to death in Sde Teiman. His rape was captured on camera and when the rapists were taken to a police station for questioning, there were huge protests in support of the rapists with the protesters demanding the accused be released. Israeli police ultimately released them and no charges were filed. The pro-rape protesters also went scot-free.

Subsequent to Al-Sarsawi’s rape-torture-death, there were multiple demonstrations in Israel, advocating for the Israelis’ “right to rape” Palestinians. Hanoch Milwidsky, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, went on to defend rape as a torture tool when dealing with Palestinians, while journalist, Yehuda Schlesinger, openly lamented on Israeli TV that raping Palestinians wasn’t an official government policy.

One of the rapists, Meir Ben-Shitrit, went on to become a celebrity in the Israeli media, featuring in TV shows. Meir Mazuz, a top Israeli rabbi, blessed the soldiers who gang-raped Al-Sarsawi, telling the rapists: “You beat the enemy, so what? It’s all good… Don’t we have the right to do it?… In any other country, they’d get medals… Don’t fear the goyim.” The Israelis’ demands in the ubiquitous right to rape protests on the streets were reflected in surveys. A staggering 65 percent of the Israeli Jews supported gang-raping the Palestinians.

Now Dr. Abu Safiya is left enduring the inhuman conditions of Israeli torture dungeons manned by genocidaires who take abusing Palestinians as their birthright, as natural as breathing.

Numerous doctors have perished in Israeli detention centres. The most egregious so far has been the case of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, who was the head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. He was brutally beaten during his detention at Sde Teiman and Ofer torture camps in December 2023. Dr. Al-Bursh’s torture was so severe that he needed support to access the toilet. One fellow detainee, who saw Dr. Al-Bursh at the Ofer facility, said that “he was naked in the lower part of his body.” Dr. Al-Bursh, the much loved and acclaimed surgeon from Gaza, was likely raped during detention and ultimately succumbed to his injuries.

The Israelis have yet to release his body.

Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi was abducted in November 2023 from his hospital in Beit Lahia and was dead within a week.

Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, was abducted from the hospital when the Israelis first laid siege to it in November 2023. He was released seven months later in July and recounted the horrific conditions the inmates were subjected to by the genocidal Israelis. Al Jazeera reported at the time:

“Our detainees have been subjected to all kinds of torture behind bars,” he said at a news conference in Gaza. “There was almost daily torture. Cells are broken into and prisoners are beaten.

“Several inmates died in interrogation centres and were deprived of food and medicine,” he added.

Gaza’s medical professionals have been especially targeted by the Israelis as they attempt to make the besieged enclave unlivable. A lack of medical professionals and facilities will certainly ensure the fulfilment of the long-held Israeli desire. During the months-long siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital and before its ultimate dismantling, the Israelis killed several doctors and other medical professionals employed at the hospital.

Sde Teiman has been a graveyard of Gaza’s medical staff. Dr. Khalid Hamouda, a general surgeon from Gaza, told Sky News last November, “In the [Sde Teiman] camp where I was there were about 100 prisoners. I think at least a quarter of them were involved in healthcare.” He added: “Some of them are doctors, and nurses, and technicians.”

The New York Times in a June report provided details of horrific abuse meted out to the abductees at the Sde Teiman facility:

Mr. [Younis] al-Hamlawi, the senior nurse [at Al-Shifa Hospital], said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.”

A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.

Mr. al-Hamlawi recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that, after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days. Mr. al-Hamlawi said he, too, had been forced to wear nothing but a diaper, to stop him from soiling the floor.

Ibrahim Shaheen, 38, a truck driver detained in early December for nearly three months, said he was shocked roughly half a dozen times while sitting in a chair. Officers accused him of concealing information about the location of dead hostages, Mr. Shaheen said.

Mr. [Fadi] Bakr also said he was forced to sit in chair wired with electricity, sending a current pulsing through his body that made him pass out.

Ibrahim Saleh, who was held for nearly eight months in Sde Teiman without any charges and whose photo with arms raised over his head behind a barbed wire fence has come to symbolise the facility, has given harrowing account of his time in the torture camp. “Nothing was more humiliating than when they made me take off my clothes, or when they inserted this object into my butt, or when a young female soldier kept [touching my penis],” he told Middle East Eye. “They even raped children.”

On January 4, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on Twitter that the Israelis had provided no updates about Dr. Abu Safiya since his December 27 detention from Kamal Adwan Hospital. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s report reveals that Dr. Abu Safiya is being handed out the same treatment that so many of his colleagues and compatriots have endured — and succumbed to — in the notorious torture chambers of Sde Teiman.

As Israel continues to ignore all appeals to release Dr. Abu Safiya, who was merely engaged in his medical duties at a great personal cost, it becomes increasingly clear that the genocidal state will let nothing come in the way of executing its extermination campaign in Gaza all the way to its completion, humanitarian obligations and global opinion be damned.

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