Concerns are growing for the safety of a prominent hospital director in Gaza who was taken into Israeli custody after the Israel Defense Forces raided the site, detained scores of people and forced the closure of one of the last functioning medical facilities in the enclave’s north.
Video captured outside Kamal Adwan Hospital and verified by NBC News shows its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, wearing a white medical overcoat and walking alone toward a military vehicle. The street is strewn with rubble and the buildings around him appear destroyed, the video shared widely on social media shows.
While it isn’t clear exactly when the video was shot, the Israeli military confirmed Monday that it had detained and interrogated Abu Safiya. He was being held as a “suspect” and being questioned over “potential involvement in terrorist activity,” IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said in a post on X.
Before his detention, Abu Safiya, a pediatrician, repeatedly warned about the IDF’s raid on the hospital and how it endangered patients, including premature babies.
On Friday, he posted video on his Instagram account showing a quadcopter dropping a bomb a few yards from Kamal Adwan Hospital, with the bomb exploding with a loud bang before sending plumes of smoke into the air.
On Friday, video geolocated by NBC News to the area around the hospital showed a crowd of men stripped down to minimal clothing walking in a line with their hands raised. Separately, NBC News’ crew on the ground in Gaza captured video of a blaze tearing through several units at the hospital on the same day. In it, people could be seen racing to try to douse the flames with buckets of water, while others sifted through the rubble.
Shoshani previously said there was no connection between the fire and the IDF’s activities at the site.
Since Friday, there has been no sign of Abu Safiya, with international organizations, including the World Health Organization, sounding the alarm and demanding his release.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday in a statement on X, adding that Kamal Adwan was forced to go out of service following the IDF’s raid.
“We call for his immediate release,” Ghebreyesus said, while noting that Abu Safiya’s “whereabouts are unknown.”
Hospitals and medical workers are considered protected under international law, which states that they must never become targets in warfare.
The IDF did not immediately respond to questions about Abu Safiya’s whereabouts, condition or any possible charges against him.
The IDF alleged that Kamal Adwan had been used as a “Hamas command center.” More than 240 people were detained over the weekend, all of them “terrorists,” it added in a statement.
Sharing a photo of Abu Safiya, over the weekend, the international human rights group Amnesty International said it was “extremely concerned over the fate & wellbeing” of the medical director.
“He must be released immediately and unconditionally,” the organization said in a statement posted on X.
Ghebreyesus said critical patients had been moved out of Kamal Adwan to the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which he noted was “itself out of function.”
He said WHO workers on the ground and partnering groups were able to deliver basic medical and hygiene supplies, as well as water Monday to the Indonesian Hospital, in addition to transferring 10 critical patients to Al-Shifa Hospital, which has been heavily bombed and raided by Israeli forces repeatedly throughout the war in the Gaza Strip.
But Ghebreyesus said that at least four patients were detained during WHO’s efforts. “We urge Israel to ensure their health care needs and rights are upheld,” he said.
Meanwhile, the WHO director-general noted that multiple other hospitals in Gaza had also been attacked over the past several days.
The IDF has repeatedly said that hospitals and other civilian infrastructure are being exploited by Hamas and used as military sites, and frequently targeted the facilities during the more than a yearlong offensive in the enclave.
Local health officials vehemently dispute claims that medical centers are used by Hamas or other militants.
Israeli forces’ repeated attacks on hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza have left the enclave’s health care system decimated amid a spiraling humanitarian crisis, with most facilities damaged or destroyed in Israel’s more than a yearlong military offensive.
“If a hospital has been reduced to a bombed-out shell, it would cease to be protected, but otherwise a hospital, whether immediately used or not, is presumptively protected as an important civilian institution,” Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, previously told NBC News. “It can be attacked only if actively used for military purposes, and even then, only if the civilian harm is not disproportionate.”
The Illinois-based nonprofit organization MedGlobal was also among those to condemn the IDF’s attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital, calling it a “brutal violation of a protected medical space” as it echoed calls for Abu Safiya’s release.
“Dr. Abu Safiya and his team constitute the lifeline of healthcare provision in northern Gaza,” Rajaa Musleh, MedGlobal’s Gaza country director, said in a statement.
More than 45,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israeli forces launched their offensive in the enclave after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attack, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others taken hostage, marking a major escalation in a decadeslong conflict.
