In late 2023, I began following the assault on Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza. I wrote this poem shortly after its director, Hussam Abu Safiya, was kidnapped on December 27, 2024. He has since been held without charge or trial. In March 2026, the United Nations and Amnesty International warned that Safiya had “been subjected to torture” in a manner that demonstrated the “systematic targeting of Palestinian health workers and the decimation of the healthcare system in Gaza.” I further felt compelled to publish the piece after learning that the pediatrician’s family fears he will be executed under the new penal code dictating capital punishment for Palestinian prisoners.
You wanted it to stay a haven
when all was lost: Kamal Adwan hospital,
where even rocked by bombs and raids, you fostered
all the small possibilities of care.
The soldiers vacated. You found those patients
whose safety ceased being yours to bear
and let them sleep beneath the courtyard square.
Death craves you all with its dirty airs,
death ate your city in its slit. No, no personifications.
Not death, but men with astounding intentions.
The bullets slipping into the nursery1
are not strays. You stay.
Despite your naked interrogation in the tank,
despite your nurses and surgeons unclothed and taken2
and marched away to jails, you stay.
Such sadistic excess exceeds your training.
Palestinian neonatalist, pediatrician: in your kin-making,
your life-tending, you frustrate the plan of Generals obsessed
with the metrics of unliving. Exterminate pests,
upturn the nest. From spool to needle
of your family thread, their flames torch your wick of fate.
Your mother from Humama evicted in ’48.
Your teenage son by sniper lit.
Patients nickname you Abu Elias.
You are human, human as those you heal.
Maybe you shall teach us what a human
looks like, not a fated race but the commonweal.
You will not leave this place.
“Everything we have built, they have burned,”3
you murmur not long before your turn starts.
“They have burned our hearts. They killed my son.”
Stunned, you take spade to dun earth and lay
Ibrahim with those below the hospital’s yard.
The sound of your dirge sunders
something marrowed in the bone for
a silly shamed American gazing
on his phone. You stay.
Thigh-shot by quadcopt, you diagnose the wounded
hopping on your cane. You say your blood’s not more saintly
than your patients’, to whose chapped and bluing lips
you enlist the world to listen—will it care to hear the truth?
The soldiers pelt your ambulance upon your roof.4
Your pale doctor’s coat looks a ghost in the last photo.
Its milky contours trace a map of contested annexation.
Now their soldiers come to take you to Sde Teiman.5
You’ve seen the boys cursed and shaken
by how they touch you in that place. How Elbina shall worry!
You wade out the ruined ward where once you calmed
a mother shaking baby into world. You held out your palms
to catch that star, that fresh child who in recollection outcries
the drones wailing wild and the shouts of soldiers still unsatiated.
What new ruins your invaders made, why they’ve wasted
all Beit Lahia bare! Yet you, the healer,
batter the tanks back with your stare.
(No, they took you, you could not stay,
and the video’s angle occludes your face, that last sentence
being only my sentimental refashioning of the world’s disgrace.)
Al Jazeera 11/5/24 & 11/22/24, CNN 12/13/23 ↩
New York Times 10/26/24, Al Jazeera 12/28/24 ↩
Associated Press 11/3/24 ↩
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Times of Israel 11/17/24 ↩
CNN 1/10/25 ↩
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