Gaza hospital director held 600 days without charge or trial

Amnesty International has renewed its call for Israel to free Hussam Abu Safiya, the Palestinian paediatrician who ran Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza and who has now been in Israeli custody for 600 days without charge or trial.

Israeli forces took him on 27 December 2024, during a raid on the hospital he directed. The organisation said he had stayed at his post until the last moment before that raid, and that no charge has been brought against him in the time since.

It said he was still being held "separated from his family, his colleagues" and from the children he had treated, and described him working "day in, day out" through loss and grief while the health service around him fell apart.

Abu Safiya became one of the most widely recognised figures in that service during the war, continuing to see patients and to care for children through repeated Israeli attacks and through losses of his own.

The demands on his behalf have come mainly from his own profession. More than 800 doctors, nurses and other health workers in Britain put their names to a letter in July asking the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, to intervene and press for his release.

The number is the only part of this case that moves. No charge has been filed and no trial has been set, so there is no hearing to attend and no ruling to wait for, and the length of his detention is very nearly the whole of what is publicly known about it. That is why the calls for him are pinned to a count of days rather than to a date in a court, and why they are raised by rights organisations and by other doctors rather than argued anywhere on his behalf.