Photograph Source: WAFA (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages)‏‏ – CC BY-SA 3.0

Israeli guards continue to torment Gazan Dr. Abu Safiya, endangering his life. For better or worse, he has become the Palestinian face of Israeli atrocities against doctors, nurses and medics. Per Amnesty International September 9, “We are deeply alarmed by the disturbing reports of Hussam Abu Safiya being subjected to continued beatings, deliberate sleep deprivation and threats against divulging his detention conditions.” So Israel wants to continue committing crimes against this doctor and get a free pass for it. Ain’t gonna happen.

It’s been known since December 27, 2024, when Israeli troops first got their hands on Safiya, that they would do exactly what they had done: behave like barbarians. Safiya was a target because he would not abandon Kamal Adwan Hospital, at that time north Gaza’s last major hospital. Safiya inspired hope, as heroes do. For this Israel decided to crush him, and its prison bigwig, dehumanized buffoon Itamar Ben Gvir clearly is not the creature to petition for humane treatment. After all, Gvir is the thug who applauded the new law that mandates the death penalty with abbreviated legal recourse for Palestinians for such crimes as stone-throwing. Clearly any effort to end Dr. Safiya’s abuse must aim high above Gvir’s empty, murderous head.

In a week when all eyes were on unprecedented Houthi victories in the Red Sea, Israel deported 154 Palestinians from its gulag to Egypt and other locations. Dr. Safiya should be so lucky. Likud fanatics seem determined to alienate the entire world and cement Israel’s international pariah status by making him as miserable as possible. This will backfire; in fact, it already has. The world knows Israeli guards have assaulted Dr. Safiya with hammers. The world knows Israeli prison honchos okayed starving a selfless man of medicine. The world knows Israeli guards deny Dr. Safiya medical attention. And the more the world knows, as it will keep knowing, the more the world hates Israel. Genius strategy, Ben Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu. Create immortal heroes, whose names as saints obliterated beneath your grotesque juggernaut will never be forgotten. Is Israel run by idiots or what?

We know Dr. Safiya is still being tortured, because his lawyer told Al Jazeera so and that outlet reported it September 3. Then, finally, on September 10 came stupendous news, headlined by ABC: “69 Members of Congress call on Rubio to help secure release of prominent Palestinian doctor.” The article reported that Dr. Safiya had been jailed over 500 days with no formal charges and no trial. “The letter, led by Reps. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., and Raul Ruiz, D-Calif…expressed ‘urgent concern’ over Abu Safiya’s physical well-being.” This epistle urges Rubio “to advocate for an end to [Safiya’s] seemingly indefinite detention during any upcoming engagements with the Israeli government.” If there’s any way secretary of state Marco Rubio can parlay this into a presidential campaign sound bite, then I’m sure it’s a go. (And there is.)

Why did Israel target this doctor? Because during the first 14 months of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, “Abu Safiya became one of the most prominent voices in Gaza, speaking out on social media about the strip’s collapsing healthcare system,” reports ABC. “He documented the struggle to keep his hospital open despite multiple sieges…Safiya continued his work amid his 15-year-old son being killed during the war and suffering an injury to his thigh and back…Safiya has been held in five different prisons…has lost 20 kilograms (44 pounds) and was denied access to high blood pressure medication for at least two months…[and is now] suffering from scabies…Safiya’s personal attorney said that during a recent visit, the doctor had fresh bruises and was struggling to remain conscious.”

Said the estimable Ruiz: “I am calling on secretary Rubio to work with the Israeli government to release Dr. Abu Safiya so he can get the urgent medical care he needs.” So the question of the hour is, what’s in it for Rubio? I’ll tell you: Votes. If Rubio can burnish his credentials as the politico who thrust the Jaws of Life into the underground Israeli Rakefat prison, seized, extracted and saved a trapped, expiring Dr. Abu Safiya, Rubio will be the first person in the entire Trump or, for that matter, Biden, regime to lift a finger for a Palestinian. And this isn’t just any prisoner. This is someone whose abuse at Israeli hands is legend. There is a huge American public appetite for justice of this sort.

Rubio has not so far shown that he is an especially savvy politician: he’s more of a fanatical ideologue who seems mistakenly to believe that winning the reactionary Cuban American vote in South Florida will catapult him into the white house. It won’t. But if he uses his pull with Jerusalem to rescue Dr. Safiya, there is no doubt that he’ll garner kudos from unexpected corners of the political world and the public at large.

Because make no mistake: as Dr. Safiya rots in Rakefat prison, he is a huge liability for Israel and for the Trump regime; his death would be an even more titanic liability, while every day his abuse becomes a bigger liability because there is no secret about the barbarity Israel has inflicted on him. Indeed, when 69 members of the U.S. congress pen a letter to Rubio decrying Israeli brutality, you know public revulsion at Israel, at the Trump regime, has reached critical mass. Do these nitwit perpetrators contain anyone within their ranks with the smarts to perceive this? That remains a question. But Israel screaming the transparent lie that Dr. Safiya is a Hamas colonel won’t win it a freaking thing, because the whole world well knows this is bunk and a mendacious excuse to conceal the criminal torture of an innocent Gazan doctor.

According to Palestinian officials, at least three doctors have died in Israeli custody during the genocide. Currently 83 Gazan medical workers, including Dr. Safiya, languish in the hellholes called Israeli prisons. These are lawless places outside the precincts of civilization. Places where torture, starvation and deliberate, disgusting degradation of helpless captives are the norm. All of these medics deserve instant release, not just Dr. Safiya. All of them must be protected from the fate of Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, the former head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who died after being severely beaten during interrogation after his arrest by Israeli troops in November 2023.

Dr. Safiya told his last known visitor, “They brought me here to kill me,” about his solitary confinement in the Rakefat pit. He may be right, if the monstruous wickedness and stupidity of Israeli so-called leadership prevails. After all, Israelis have killed other doctors and medics in their prisons and plenty out in the open, in Gaza. The medicide is policy. But the belief that only Israelis and not Palestinians deserve doctors will be smashed by history, events and global revulsion at what Israel has done. Let’s hope Israel’s idiot, one-track-mind, pig-headed, insanely siege-mentality rulers perceive this before they perpetrate even more crimes, and stain their hands with even more blood, over and over, irrevocably.