On October 29, 2023, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and neonatologist based at Kamal Adwan hospital in the northern Gaza Strip city of Beit Lahiya, published an op-ed in the New York Times. “As I write this,” Dr. Abu Safiya warned the world, “[Kamal Adwan] hospital is on the precipice of true disaster.”
One year later, as the humans and robots of the genocidal Israeli war machine took over Beit Lahiya and zeroed in on Kamal Adwan hospital, Israeli political leaders, military planners, and journalistic lackeys chirped about weapons and fighters holed up inside or buried underneath the hospital grounds. This was not the first time the Israeli narrative about Hamas using civilian institutions and infrastructure as bases for armaments and training facilities; it was also not the first time Israelis and their allies would invent false narratives to that effect. To be sure, even if there had been combatants in the area—and for decades Israeli legal and military strategists have been expanding the limits and the concept of who or what constitutes a “combatant” in the first place—an assault on a hospital or any other medical facility even in time of war is a direct and flagrant violation of the Geneva convention.
In late November 2024 I was asked by an editor at the New York Times whether I would be willing to translate from the Arabic a series of video messages, texts, and voice memos that Dr. Abu Safiya was managing to secret out of Gaza even amid the infrastructural collapse, electricity shortages, stalking starvation, and limited Internet bandwidth available to him as well as those trapped with him inside Kamal Adwan. In the videos, which are still streaming on the servers of the New York Times, the incessant Israeli bombing rattles the viewer’s nerves through the immediacy of our screens.
Under such punishing siege, as mortar shells slammed into the surgical theaters and the stairwells, as children cried out in pain and panic, Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff found themselves to be no different than the nearly two million other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who were being terrorized, starved, and massacred.
When there was barely any hospital left to defend, and no patients left to treat, Dr. Abu Safiya walked out into the blinding light of the world, heroically facing down an Israeli tank, alone.
Kamal Adwan was the last medical facility standing in northern Gaza, that is, until it finally fell, on December 27, 2024. Dr. Abu Safiya refused to evacuate and abandon his post, remaining steadfast in the hospital along with his colleagues, staff, and hundreds of wounded, paralyzed, and dying patients, some of whom had walked for miles with mortal injuries only to die on the outskirts of the hospital, in its courtyard, or sometimes under the supervision and care of Palestinian doctors, nurses, orderlies, and volunteers who risked their own lives and struggled to ensure the survival of as many of these defenseless and dehumanized Palestinians as possible, but had to work under inadequate, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions. Limited supplies of medicine and other essential items, too many of which had been labeled “dual use” by cynical or vengeful Israeli inspectors along the border crossings, were further insurance that many Palestinians would have to die.
When there was barely any hospital left to defend, and no patients left to treat, Dr. Abu Safiya walked out into the blinding light of the world, heroically facing down an Israeli tank, alone, a figure captured in a photograph that will haunt the world for generations; an image that continues to ignite the concern, the grief, and the horror of people around the world, at least those who can still feel and think and aspire to remain human beings.
And so it was that Dr. Abu Safiya was kidnapped by Israeli forces and disappeared into the bowels of their carceral netherworld of “administrative detention.” One might have expected the Times to ensure that this story—Dr. Abu Safiya’s story and the story of his patients and his staff and his hospital—was not forgotten. Brief mention was later made of a “targeted operation” against Kamal Adwan on December 27. On December 28, the Times referred to the detainment of Dr. Abu Safiya in a single sentence buried after an obedient paraphrase of the Israeli military’s video announcement that 240 “militants” had been swept up in the raid on the hospital.
The newspaper that had helped to platform the struggle and suffering of Dr. Abu Safiya and his community had now betrayed him. It could not have done so without the labor of translators such as myself. I, for one, swallowed my political commitments to the cause of Palestinian liberation and dedicated my labor to a newspaper that still refuses to recognize its own complicity in and support for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people: “plausible” at the time of Dr. Abu Safiya’s abduction, according to the International Court of Justice; unmistakable, then and now, for many of us. I could not refuse that opportunity to help transmit Dr. Abu Safiya’s messages to the world. But, as I suspected at the time, the New York Times would do little to no further diligence in service of the life, or even the legacy, of Dr. Abu Safyia.
On January 7, 2025, Ephrat Livni, an Israel-born correspondent based in Washington who writes for the Times’s “DealBook” newsletter, solemnly filed news of compelling “evidence” that had been freshly released by the Israeli military based on the “interrogation of one of the more than 240 militants” Israel claims it found hunkered down in Kamal Adwan. Circumspect in her assessment, the reporter added the caveat that she and her employer were “not able to independently verify the claims made in the video, or to determine the circumstances under which the detainee made the admission.”
For this reason—in addition to the hundreds of other examples of shoddy or deliberately misleading and biased reporting in its pages—I am joining the call for a global boycott of the New York Times.
At the time of this writing, according to the most recent publicly available information, Dr. Abu Safiya is being held without charge in arbitrary detention, subjected to extended solitary confinement in a cold, damp, windowless cell, perhaps in the notorious Israeli torture camp Sde Teiman, perhaps elsewhere, enduring physical abuse and torture, with limited access to legal counsel, medical care, and family visitation. According to his lawyers, by the middle of 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya had lost nearly 100 pounds and had developed a number of medical conditions.
Meanwhile, his family is stuck in unbearable limbo. The weight of this loss—Dr. Abu Safiya’s physical body, the time with his family, friends, colleagues and patients, his availability to provide much-needed medical care, camaraderie, and guidance for the people of Gaza—should weigh upon the conscience of the world. There are many who have rallied to his defense, holding vigils and protests in cities and towns across Europe to North and South America as well as throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The most deafening silence in all of this is on the part of the New York Times itself. For this reason—in addition to the hundreds of other examples of shoddy or deliberately misleading and biased reporting in its pages—I am joining the call from Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and other civil society groups for a global boycott of the New York Times. The paper must give expanded coverage to the bloody and inhuman treatment of Palestinians in Israeli detention as well as to the unended genocidal war that is still being unleashed upon the Palestinian people of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the Lebanese and Syrian people, who continue to be subjected to ethnic cleansing and ecocidal violence throughout the borderlands.
Dr. Abu Safiya deserves better than being reduced to a few advertising clicks for a news organization that does not care whether he lives or dies. The least we can do is stop giving our financial and symbolic support to them.
