A Gaza doctor and hospital director who criticized Israel in two New York Times op-eds has been revealed to be a Hamas colonel.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is a Palestinian pediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. He was arrested by Israeli forces on 27 December 2024 and has since been held in an Israeli prison. His arrest sparked scores of international campaigns calling for his release. Amnesty International, for example, launched a campaign for his unconditional release in which it refers to him as an "arbitrarily detained Palestinian health worker." Multiple other activist groups refer to him as the 'hero' of Gaza.
Last month, Safiya was granted "Honorary Citizenship" by the city of Lyon, France. The city said, "Safiya is one of the leading figures in Gaza's health system and embodies the courage of healthcare workers in the face of the unspeakable.
Evidence of Safiya's Hamas involvement
Following Lyon's announcement, NGO Monitor Senior Researcher Vincent Chebat began researching Safiya. He soon discovered a photo of the doctor in his Hamas uniform “at a gathering of Hamas elites, including Gen. Abu Obaida Al-Jarrah, Director of Military Medical Services Saeed Saoudi, and National Security Forces commander Col. Naeem Al-Ghoul" in 2016. He is also referred to as a colonel in a 2020 Facebook post on the Gaza Medical Services page.
NGO Monitor and online researchers also found multiple Arabic-language sources that have openly referred to Safiya as "Colonel Hussam Abu Safiya." Kamal Adwan has also been referred to as a Hamas stronghold. Additionally, researchers found Safiya's Facebook posts celebrating Oct 7 and invoking terror against "the Jews." One read: "And they thought their fortresses would protect them from God, but God came upon them from where they did not expect, and cast terror into their hearts" alongside a picture of terrorists parachuting into Israel on the day of the massacre. An IDF spokesman has also confirmed that Safyia was a ranking member of Hamas.
Despite his Hamas rank being well known in Arabic media, Safiya was still invited to write opinion pieces for the NYT. Since Oct 7, he has been invited to write two anti-Israel op-eds blaming Israel for hospital crises, fuel shortages, civilian suffering, and "horrific" attacks on Gaza's health system.
"We are suffering and paying the price of the genocide that is happening to our people here in the northern Gaza Strip," he wrote in one.
Neither Safyia nor the NYT disclosed his reported affiliation with Hamas.
“Those who platformed Abu Safiya must do some serious soul-searching, and figure out how they ended up promoting the propaganda of a literal Hamas terrorist,” Chebat told The New York Post.
"A basic search of Google and social media enabled me to prove he is a colonel," Chebat told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "So, if I can do that, anyone who wants to vet such a person can do the same."
"Therefore, he should never have been granted the "honorary citizenship" of Lyon. Similarly, all the NGOs campaigning for his release should also be aware of these facts."
The translator of Safiya's articles for the NYT, Max Weiss, has actually criticized the paper for its "deafening silence" on the situation in Gaza and the treatment of Abu Safiya. Following the publication of the second piece, Weiss called for a global boycott of the New York Times and demanded it 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."
He also accused the NYT of "burying" a "single sentence about the detainment of Safiya after "an obedient paraphrase of the Israeli military’s video announcement that 240 “militants” had been swept up in the raid on the hospital."