Why Dr. Abu Safiya was Given the "Courage Award" 2025

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This piece by MECC Executive Director Stanley Heller was published on 12/4/25 in the CT Hearst newspapers.  It includes many of the reasons he was given the award.

 Opinion: A Connecticut call for Israel to release Palestinian doctor  

The ceremony was featured on this TSVN program https://youtu.be/4bueCwIka2Y?si=uTJbIgVwBQR486Ty

  Sponsors:

Middle East Crisis Committee

Promoting Enduring Peace  PEPeace.org

  Cosponsors:

American Muslims for Palestine

Bridgeport Islamic Center

Community Alliance for Peace and Justice

Connecticut Palestine Alliance

CT Democratic Socialists of America

CT Civil Liberties Defense Committee

Doctors Against Genocide

Health Care Workers for Palestine

Jewish Voice for Peace New Haven

Mending Minyan

Muslim Advocacy for Rights, Unity, and Fairness - MARUF

Palestine Solidarity Committee of the UU Congregation of Danbury

Shalom United Church of Christ

Unidad Latina en Acción 

We Will Return

WesPac

Yalies for Palestine

Click here to register to watch the 11/22 ceremony in honor of Dr. Abu Safiya at 3 p.m. Eastern

Do a drawing of Dr. Abu Safiya (many images of him on the internet) with a slogan like #FreeDrAbuSafiya or a poem or a song.  Spread it around.

Make a small sign supporting him.  Have someone take a photo of you with the sign.  Post it online on many friends' and lists' pages.  

Get a few people together with large signs in front of a hospital for an hour. Scroll up for .pdf 's of pictures you could print out and post.

Send letters and opinion pieces to the corporate media

Make a YouTube "short" or a FB "reel"

Write to local medical workers unions that are part of 1199.  In Oct of 2024 the national union declared "“We call on the Biden administration to enforce the Foreign Assistance Act and suspend military assistance to Israel for its continued blockage of aid necessary to avert catastrophic famine,” One would think it's a fertile area for brining up Abu Safiya's treatment.

Write to medical associations.

Make up pins with Dr. Abu Safiya's image

Contact your members of Congress via this Physicians for Humanity page.

Join with over 17,000 others and send a letter via this Amnesty International page.

A petition in Italian, English and Arabic.

Here's a site devoted to his freedom

Appeal launched by the Movement for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

Free Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya—an icon of civil resistance in Gaza—and all illegally detained Palestinian health workers

Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and head of Kamal Adwan hospital, is one of the boldest symbols of civil resistance in Gaza. Through his work he gave a voice to the victims of Gaza and denounced the attack on the right of all Palestinians to health and life. On December 27, 2024, after months of Israeli siege of the hospital he built, Dr. Abu Safiya was illegally taken and imprisoned in Israel. That same day, Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan hospital, destroyed a number of wards, and seized doctors, nurses, and patients. 

Since then, Dr. Abu Safiya has been detained without formal charges and has been held in solitary confinement since. When his lawyer, Ghaida Qassem, finally managed to see him on February 11, 2025, she was faced with an exhausted man suffering from untreated infections and showing clear signs of torture. By her third visit on July 14, Dr. Abu Safiya had dramatically lost weight. Recent negotiations for his release have been unsuccessful; in fact, his unlawful detention has been extended again.

Shockingly, his case is not the only one. Among the thousands of Palestinians illegally detained in Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, at least 405 are healthcare workers; dozens of them, including 16 doctors, are still being held without charge. The conditions of many of them are unknown to this day. 

At the same time, according to recent OCHA figures, Israeli forces in Gaza killed 1,722 doctors, nurses, and paramedics since October 7, 2023: it is the largest number of healthcare workers killed in recent history in a war zone and represents 8.9% of Gaza’s healthcare workforce. Currently, few of Gaza’s 36 hospitals function at all and less than 30% of its outpatient clinics are in operation. Those still functioning are in desperate condition, without electricity, anesthetics or other essential equipment for emergency care.

According to WHO, between October 2023 and May 2025 the Israeli army carried out 720 attacks on health targets in the Gaza Strip, hitting 125 medical facilities, 34 hospitals, and 186 ambulances. However, hospitals were targeted long before October 7, 2023, and not just in Gaza. WHO also reported that between 2019 and 2021 there were 563 attacks on health facilities: 288 in the West Bank, including 93 in East Jerusalem, and 275 in the Gaza Strip.

These figures do not describe a side effect of war, but a deliberate strategy: the destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and of every principle of humanitarian law. As pointed out by Dr. Safia Mahomed, a professor of bioethics and health law at the University of South Africa, hospitals, ‘traditionally regarded as sanctuaries of humanity, [have been transformed] into corridors of horror.’ 

The detention of Dr. Abu Safiya and his colleagues is an extension of the same logic: to punish healers, to obliterate the very act of healing. Every day that Palestinian doctors and health workers spend in detention in Israeli jails is another day on which the universal right to health is trampled upon and human dignity is violated.

We therefore strongly demand:

▪ the immediate and unconditional release of Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya;

▪ the release of all illegally detained healthcare workers;

▪ an urgent intervention by the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and global medical organizations to reinstate the protection of healthcare personnel in the Gaza Strip and throughout Palestine, and the sacrosanct right to healthcare for all.

Every signature, every voice, every share is an act of civil responsibility.

Today, silence is complicity.

The Letter was organized by Massimo Amato of The Movement for Justice and Peace in the Middle East and endorsed by Professor Naftali Kaminski.

Signed by Naftali Kaminski, MD, Professor of Medicine, 

The day had begun with hope, a fragile, trembling hope, like the first flame that flickers in a storm.

We were preparing to open the medical point, four walls of wood, a roof of plastic, a table, and a chair.

Nothing more.

And yet, to us, it was a cathedral.

For in lands where hospitals are rubble, a single room where mercy breathes becomes a temple of the living God.

I had locked the door and begun to walk away when I heard a cry behind me.

“Doctor! Don’t go! Doctor!”

There are words that split the air like a lightning bolt; this was one of them.

I turned and saw men running, barefoot, carrying a child whose body was too still, too light.

They were running as if chased by the very angels of death.

And there, beneath the open sky, I saw the horror that words cannot hold.

The child’s hand was gone, devoured by the fire of man.

His bones gleamed white, obscene, like the laughter of war itself.

His face, oh his face, was burned into a mask of innocence and agony.

He did not cry; he looked, and that look will haunt eternity.

I pressed my hands to the wound, my useless trembling hands, and I thought:

What have we done, O Lord, that the earth itself explodes beneath the feet of children?

The nearest clinic was thirty minutes away, thirty minutes between a wound and salvation.

His name was Adham.

He was nine years old.

He had been playing before his family’s tent, holding a thin copper wire in his hand. He pressed it into the ground, not knowing that the soil of Gaza hides the fragments of war. The wire touched what men had left behind, and the earth exploded beneath him. In that single instant, the world was unmade.

That day, I understood: the universe is smaller than the distance between a wound and a doctor.

And in Gaza, that distance is infinite.

But even among the ruins, something greater than despair stirs.

The child was carried away, and I stood there alone, the blood of innocence on my hands, yet I felt that same blood beating in my own veins.

In that moment, I knew that as long as one man bends down to save another, God has not abandoned the world.

Tomorrow, the medical point will open.

It will not be a hospital; it will be a whisper against the storm.

But every whisper of compassion is stronger than the roar of cannons.

I will open the doors again,

because mercy is an act of defiance,

because healing is resistance,

because one small lamp of kindness lit in a night like this

is enough to shame the darkness of a century.