Israeli forces torture and kill Gaza doctors, reports say

    (The Canadian journalist Eva Karene Bartlett recently wrote an article for RT ( Russia Today) about the abduction and torture of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamar Adwan Hospital in Gaza and on the torture and killing of other doctors in Gaza. The article by Bartlett is reprinted here in its entirety.)  

 By Eva Karene Bartlett

  Despite the recent hostage swap with Hamas, multiple health professionals are still being held captive, with abundant reports of mistreatment, neglect and torture. One of these is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, arrested on December 27 and transferred to the notorious Sde Teyman prison camp (dubbed Israel’s version of Guantanamo Bay).

As each day passes, and with reports from released prisoners who attest Dr. Abu Safiya was being tortured while they were in the same prison, fears of his death grow. At least three Palestinian doctors abducted from Gaza have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

Dr. Abu Safiya, the director of  Kamal Adwan Hospital, was taken after the IDF had repeatedly attacked the hospital over the course of over three months, ultimately invading it, burning and severely damaging essential buildings, and detaining dozens of medical staff. By now the chilling scene of Dr. Abu Safiya walking toward the Israeli tank has gone viral, as people around the world are demanding his release.

According to Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity working in Palestine, when the IDF invaded his place of work, “an estimated 350 people, including patients, were forced to leave the hospital. Some patients arrived at the Indonesian Hospital, which was not able to provide any care after being forced out of service by the Israeli military on December 24. The last remaining partially operational hospital in the North Gaza Governorate, al-Awda Hospital, is on the brink of collapse, struggling to function amid relentless attacks and resource shortages.”

Read more

 Is the Israel-Hamas truce doomed to fail?

The non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that after abducting him, “the Israeli army subsequently transferred Dr. Abu Safiya to a field interrogation site in the Al-Fakhura area of Jabalia Refugee Camp, where he was stripped and whipped with a thick wire commonly used for street electrical wiring.”

The torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has been widely reported. Methods include electric shocks to genitals, stress positions, psychological torture, near-starvation, and rape resulting in serious internal damage.

Following a request by the non-profit organization Physicians for Humans Rights-Israel (PHRI) for a legal visit to  Abu Safiya, the Israeli military claimed that it had “found no indication of the arrest or detention of the individual in question.” 

However, one report cites Palestinians released from Sde Teiman detention camp on December 29, 2024, saying Dr. Abu Safiya was being held there. One of the released Palestinians said the doctor had given him the phone numbers of his sons, and requested that The Red Cross and media look into his situation.

On January 5, PHRI posted on X, “The Israeli military also continues to withhold information about Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s detention location, despite retracting their earlier claim that he isn’t being held in Israel.”

A more recently-released detainee, Hazem Alwan, said he had been abducted from Jabalia by the Israeli army and used as a human shield before ultimately being taken to an Israeli prison, where he says he spent two days with Dr. Abu Safiya.

“It was clear, the brutal methods of torture used by the occupation on him. Dr. Hussam is in danger, nobody is looking after him. His mental state is completely shattered, completely...”

In October 2024, when the Israeli army invaded Kamal Adwan Hospital, they killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s son, Ibrahim. But Dr. Abu Safiya continued to work to help injured Palestinians in the dire conditions of northern Gaza.

In November 2024, he was injured in an Israeli quad-copter drone attack, believed to be, “an assassination attempt by Israel due to his unwavering commitment to providing medical care to patients in northern Gaza.”

He continued his updates from the besieged hospital, on December 6, 2024, noting, “The situation inside and around the hospital is catastrophic. There are a large number of martyrs and wounded, including four martyrs from the hospital’s medical staff, and there are no surgeons left.”

Read more

 Shattering the bonds: Will 2025 be the year of freedom for former colonies?

He spoke of the series of Israeli airstrikes, just outside the hospital, and of being forced by Israeli soldiers to evacuate all patients, displaced persons and medical staff to the hospital yard and forcibly take them out to the checkpoint.

“In the morning, we were shocked to see hundreds of dead bodies and wounded people in the streets surrounding the hospital.”

On January 9, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, an NGO based in the Gaza Strip, noted that, “Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention was extended until February 13, 2025 by an Israeli Court” and that his legal counsel – which has been prevented from seeing him – will remain banned from visiting the doctor until January 22. 

Still another doctor, Dr. Akram Abu Ouda, head of Orthopedics at the Indonesian Hospital (also in northern Gaza) is missing. Ramy Abdu (of Euro-Med) noted, “He has been detained by Israel for over a year, and it is our duty to remind the world he is wrongfully imprisoned, suffering under torture, with his health deteriorating.”

Palestinian doctors tortured to death

In September 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, stated, “Dr. Ziad Eldalou is the third doctor confirmed to have died while being detained by Israel since October 7, 2023.”

Eldalou was, the OHCHR notes, an internal medicine physician at Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, detained with other healthcare workers by invading Israeli soldiers on March 18, 2024, who died just three days later, while in detention.

In its report on Dr. Abu Safiya, Euro-Med recalls the deaths of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was “killed under torture at Ofer Detention Centre on April 19, 2024,” and Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was “killed due to torture at an Israeli Shin Bet interrogation center in Ashkelon, one week after his detention in November 2023. Israeli authorities concealed his death for more than seven months.”

Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was “likely raped to death,” wrote United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese.

These murders, and the imprisonment and torture of numerous Palestinian doctors from Gaza, and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinian health and medical professionals, are part of Israel’s systematic attack on every aspect of Gaza’s health care system, as well as on the Palestinians’ morale: seeing doctors who didn’t abandon their patients be imprisoned, tortured and killed is a crushing blow.

Read more

 Can Israel survive its new war in the West Bank?

Both Mofokeng and Albanese, at the beginning of January, 2025, issued an urgent warning: “We are horrified and concerned by reports from northern Gaza and especially the attack on the healthcare workers including the last remaining of 22 now-destroyed hospitals: Kamal Adwan Hospital.”

“We are gravely concerned with the fate of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, yet another doctor to be harassed, kidnapped and arbitrarily detained by the occupation forces, in his case for defying evacuation orders to leave his patients and colleagues behind. This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza.”

The lack of information on Dr. Abu Safiya’s well-being, the testimonies from released abductees that he was being tortured, and the prohibition on him accessing his lawyer have heightened fears that he could die in Israeli detention. 

This must not be allowed to happen. As Euro-Med stated, immediate international intervention is needed for his release. What’s even more tragic is that were he being held by one of the West’s proclaimed ‘adversaries’, rather than its allies, such intervention would not be long in coming.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Opinion

Why did NBC hire John Brennan?

By Reginald Johnson

     It was a deeply disappointing decision made by NBC last month to hire former CIA director John Brennan to serve as a national security and intelligence analyst.

  It appears that either NBC overlooked a number of the very controversial and distressing aspects of Brennan’s career, or they just didn’t care.

  In hiring Brennan, NBC is taking on board an individual who has been implicated in what many consider to have been illegal programs carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations in prosecuting the war on terror ---- namely, the use of alleged torture techniques in interrogating terror suspects and the use of drone missiles to carry out “extra-judicial assassinations” of suspected terror leaders around the world.

  Brennan is also someone whose honesty has come into question during investigations by Congress about the counterterror programs and, more recently, about the controversial and much criticized “Russian dossier.”  That document, prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, helped trigger the Special Counsel probe into possible collusion between the presidential election campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian government prior to the 2016 election. The investigation, depending on its findings, could lead to Trump’s impeachment.

    During the administration of George W. Bush, Brennan was a top counterterrorism official and senior official at the CIA.  Critics charge that he endorsed the CIA use of “enhanced terror interrogation” techniques in questioning terrorism suspects --- including  waterboarding and other brutal practices.  Waterboarding is considered torture, which is banned under international law.

 It was also reported that Brennan had many suspects picked up and taken through the “extroardinary rendition” program to “black sites” --- in countries such as Egypt and Syria, where security officials in those countries would carry out torture to extract information for the U.S. 

 Administration legal officials put out memos saying that the interrogation techniques carried out by the CIA fell within the law and denied torture was taking place. For his part, Brennan said that while he was aware of the harsh interrogation tactics, he was not the one who suggested them in the first place and in some cases opposed the practices.

 In 2014 the Senate intelligence committee did a major investigation of Bush-era interrogation methods and produced a scathing 6,000 page report criticizing the CIA’s program.  In the words of the New York Times story on the report,  “the CIA’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed;” that the interrogation program was “mismanaged and not subject to adequate oversight;”  and that the CIA “misled members of Congress and the White House about the effectiveness and extent of the brutal interrogation techniques.”

    At the time that the Senate was investigating the CIA for its possible role in torture, Brennan  had risen to director of the agency, following his nomination by Obama and confirmation by Congress.  According to former CIA analyst and writer Ray McGovern, Brennan was furious over the Senate investigation and worked actively to stop the report from being released. At Brennan’s behest, agency personnel  spied on the Senate committee that was doing the investigation and hacked into staff computers to find out what was being found.

   Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, chairwoman of the committee, was so angered by the CIA tactics that she took to the floor of the Senate to blast the agency and its director.

    Although President Obama tried to block release of the report, eventually the report was made public, due to the determined efforts of former Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.

Former CIA Director John Brennan   (WSJ.com)

   

  As CIA director, Brennan developed the targeted assassination program, in which terror suspects are killed by drone missiles. Brennan worked closely with Obama to draw up kill-lists of people who needed to be taken out.  Thousands of people have been killed in drone strikes, which have hit Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq.

   Brennan maintained that the strikes were causing little or no “collateral damage.”  But that claim was contradicted by human rights observers and a study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism which found that there was a substantial civilian death toll from the missile attacks.

   Legal observers have also charged that the drone warfare program is illegal when it is carried out in countries where the United States is not at war. That would include Pakistan and Yemen. Critics have also maintained that it is unconstitutional for the drone strikes to be targeting American citizens --- which has taken place on several occasions. The most notable  example of this was the drone killing of Al Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.  He was an American citizen, born in New Mexico. Awlaki’s son, also an American citizen,  was later killed by an errant missile strike, intended for someone else.

    It is illegal under the Constitution to take the life of an American citizen without due process of law. CIA and military officials argued that it would’ve been extremely difficult to capture al-Alwaki and then bring him to the United States for prosecution. That claim has been disputed by opponents of the program however, who said military personnel had the means to capture him.

 Since Trump took office in January of last year, questions have also arisen about whether Brennan has been entirely candid about what he knew about the infamous “Russian dossier” ---- which alleged that there were connections between candidate Donald Trump and Russian officials prior to the 2016 U.S. election and that Russia interfered with the election to benefit Trump.  The dossier was a key part of the information that was submitted by the FBI to the FISA court in 2016 and 2017 to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign team.

  Brennan has maintained in testimony given in May 2017 before the House intelligence committee and in press interviews that he didn’t know that much about the dossier and its contents prior to the election. He told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press early this year that during the fall of 2016 prior to the election he had “heard only snippets” about the contents of the dossier, based on press reports. He said he had never actually read the dossier until late that year.

  But according to a report in Real Clear Investigations by Paul Street on February 11, investigators working with Republicans on the House  Intelligence committee believe that Brennan was well aware of the contents of the dossier and its allegations against Trump prior to the election and that he actively tried to spread the information to members of Congress.

   “John Brennan did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier,” said an investigator who talked with Street. “He politicized and effectively weaponized what was false intelligence about Trump.”

  Street said that Capitol Hill sources told him that Brennan fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI and pressured the Bureau to investigate Trump campaign figures in the summer of 2016.

   The House Intelligence panel, led by the Republican majority voted recently to end their inquiry into whether Trump had colluded with the Russians prior to the election. The committee report stated that they had found no evidence to support the claim of collusion or conspiracy with the Russians. But members of the Democratic minority strongly protested this report and said that there were still legitimate reasons for continuing the probe.

  In signing on with NBC/MSNBC as a contributor,  Brennan becomes the latest representative from the intelligence community and the Pentagon to work at the TV networks as an analyst. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell is a contributor with CBS and former NSA director James Clapper is a commentator at CNN. Former generals and high military officials are working with the networks as well, weighing in with analysis about a range of topics including the US role in the Middle East, the proper approach to dealing with North Korea and how to deal with Russia.

  The CIA has a long history of making its influence felt with the media.

 Going back to the 1940s and 1950s agency officials sought to cultivate leading figures at US newspapers such as the New York Times. They also sought to have agency people work surreptitiously at the papers or at other media outlets.  In the 1970s, a Senate committee led by then U.S. Sen. Frank Church investigating abuses by the intelligence community following the Nixon-era Watergate scandals determined that there were CIA assets working at 50 media organizations, either as reporters or as employees in other capacities.