Amnesty International currently has an entire campaign demanding his “immediate and unconditional release.” Its description leaves essentially no room for another possibility. Abu Safiya, Amnesty says, was detained while “caring for his patients and carrying out his medical duties,” and his detention reflects Israel's “systematic targeting of Palestinian health workers.”
Last month Amnesty went further, calling Israel's designation of Abu Safiya as an unlawful combatant “baseless” and declaring that he was being held “without any justification.”
There is one small problem.
Israel's Supreme Court has now said that it has seen the classified intelligence, and that the intelligence “strongly supports” the contention that Abu Safiya is a Hamas operative who actively assisted the organization during the war. The court also found that the material shows he poses a danger to state security.
That does not prove the allegation: the evidence remains classified. But it changes the story rather dramatically.
The international campaign has largely behaved as though the only possibilities are that Abu Safiya is an innocent doctor or Israel is lying. Amnesty doesn't say the evidence against him is insufficient. It calls the designation “baseless.” It demands his unconditional release.
Yet Israel presented intelligence to Supreme Court justices who are perfectly capable of ordering the government to release detainees. After reviewing that intelligence, the court reached exactly the opposite conclusion.
Is Israel's court system corrupt? Amnesty is implying it.
There was already plenty of reason to treat the idea of a Hamas-affiliated medical professional as something other than an absurd Israeli smear.
Salo Aizenberg has been compiling Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad's own martyr notices identifying people publicly described as Gaza healthcare workers who simultaneously held military positions. His running total has now reached 77 healthcare workers, while an earlier detailed thread documents nurses, doctors, technicians and hospital administrators described by Hamas or PIJ themselves as fighters and commanders.
Among them are personnel associated with Kamal Adwan Hospital itself. Aizenberg has separately pointed to evidence that Abu Safiya was a military officer.
This should sound familiar.
I wrote last month about the extraordinary propaganda campaign surrounding Abu Safiya, in which dramatic allegations about his supposedly imminent death were repeated internationally with remarkably little skepticism. The narrative had already been established: doctor = innocent; Israeli detention = persecution. Evidence that might complicate that narrative barely registered.
Now we have the Supreme Court saying that classified intelligence strongly supports Israel's case.
Perhaps Israel's intelligence is wrong. Perhaps the court evaluated it badly. Those are possibilities.
But there is another possibility that Amnesty International, much of the media and the entire international campaign seem unwilling even to contemplate:
Those categories are not mutually exclusive.
In Gaza, we now have overwhelming evidence that they sometimes overlap.
And if Abu Safiya really was helping Hamas during the war and really does pose an ongoing security danger, Amnesty is not campaigning for the release of a persecuted pediatrician.
It is campaigning for Israel to immediately and unconditionally release a Hamas operative because he wears a white coat.
Amnesty is almost certainly aware of the evidence that Abu Safiya is a Hamas operative - we have a photo of him in a Hamas uniform, after all. But if they want to claim that Israel's Supreme Court is part of the conspiracy, that would be more evidence that its hate of Israel trumps any actual evidence.
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