The Abu Safiya Propaganda Campaign - all based on uncorroborated and unlikely descriptions of a man near death ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, July 10, 2026

The Abu Safiya Propaganda Campaign - all based on uncorroborated and unlikely descriptions of a man near death

This week produced a textbook coordinated campaign : Amnesty International, CAIR, CodePink, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel all escalated calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, echoed by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and carried by the Guardian, the BBC, and NBC News.

Where did this come from?

The spark was a single visit. On July 2, Abu Safiya's lawyer, Nasser Odeh, met with him and came away describing a man near death — unable to speak lucidly, beaten by more than five guards with hands, batons, and hammers, nearly losing consciousness several times during the meeting itself, telling Odeh he did not expect to survive.

Every outlet that ran the story ran Odeh's account, and only Odeh's account. No doctor examined Abu Safiya independently. No photograph or video from the visit exists. The Israel Prison Service denies mistreatment, calling the allegations false. The entire campaign — the Amnesty statement calling the reports "truly horrifying," the UN experts' demand for immediate release, the wire coverage — rests on one lawyer's description of one meeting, a lawyer who has every incentive to shade the truth, and nearly all of it describes Abu Safiya as a civilian pediatrician with no connection to the war beyond treating its casualties.

That framing has a hole in it. A 2016 photograph uncovered by NGO Monitor shows Abu Safiya in military uniform at a Kamal Adwan ceremony alongside senior figures of Hamas's Military Medical Services and National Security Forces, and multiple Arabic-language sources refer to him as a colonel. Abu Safiya's link to Hamas's governing apparatus is a matter of public record, not an Israeli fabrication invented to justify his detention after the fact — a detail the campaign coverage this week omits entirely.

When Israeli forces took Kamal Adwan Hospital that Abu Safiya led on December 27, 2024, they detained more than 240 people they identified as Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, including 15 tied to the October 7 attack, and later released interrogation footage of a detainee describing the hospital as a shelter used to stage patrols and move weapons. It strains credulity that the hospital he ran could host so many militants without his knowledge or approval.

the publicity campaign also ignores the legality of Israel's detention of Abu Safiya. Israel is holding him under the Unlawful Combatants Law, and PHRI and the UN bodies describe that as arbitrary detention requiring either charges or release. But as retired military lawyer Brian Cox has argued, Hamas is not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions, so its fighters fall outside the POW protections of the Third Convention; the governing provision is Common Article 3, which covers non-international armed conflict and permits holding a detainee for the duration of hostilities without the judicial process that a criminal charge would require. The hostilities have not ended.

We cannot know how accurate Odeh's description of Safiya is. But it echoes testimony that surfaced months earlier from detainees released in February and March, and that testimony was, if anything, more graphic. Those detainees said Abu Safiya could not speak without repeating each word four times, that dogs had been set on him, that his weight had fallen to around forty kilograms. Read together, the two accounts describe a man who has spent the better part of a year under constant torture, beatings, and starvation, sliding steadily toward death.

There is one problem with that picture: the video from June 10.

Abu Safiya appeared before Israel's Supreme Court by video link that day, between the March testimony and Odeh's July account. He was gaunt, but not the emaciated, forty-kilogram figure described months earlier. In the five seconds of footage that circulated, he shows no visible difficulty breathing — sitting still, shackled, unremarkable.

Is it possible that Abu Safiya was near death in March, recovered enough by June to sit calmly through a hearing, and collapsed into near-death again by July? Possible, yes. Likely is a different question, especially once you notice that the lurid details are exactly what got Odeh onto the BBC, that nobody in this chain offers a claim about Abu Safiya's condition that doesn't ultimately trace back to somebody speaking on his behalf, and that the same coverage leaves out a documented military affiliation and a live legal dispute over whether his detention needs a charge at all.

Odeh has every incentive to make his client's case as urgently as he can to whichever outlet will run it, and there is nothing improper in that; it is what advocates do. The failure sits with the news organizations and human rights bodies that took a single uncorroborated account, matched it against no evidence but its own resemblance to an earlier uncorroborated account, and never asked what the one piece of footage actually showed, or what they were leaving out about who Abu Safiya is. A little more skepticism was available to all of them. They chose not to use it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!