The Wife of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: I Met Him While He Was Studying Medicine in Kazakhstan, and I Left My Homeland for Him

Speaking in fluent Arabic despite her foreign origins, Mrs. Albina Abu Safiya—as she prefers to introduce herself, taking her husband’s surname—shared with the BBC Radio program Gaza Today the love story that brought her together with her husband, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was recently detained.
The love story began in her native Kazakhstan and ultimately led her to leave her homeland and move with him to northern Gaza in 1996. Since then, she has stood by his side through the raid on the hospital, its evacuation, and Dr. Hussam’s efforts to fulfill what she described as his humanitarian duty despite extremely limited resources—“until his last breath,” as she put it.

On Saturday, December 28, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza issued a statement saying that Israeli forces had detained Abu Safiya along with dozens of other medical staff members and transferred them to a facility for questioning.
Earlier, on Friday, the Israeli military announced that it had launched an operation around Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza in order, according to its statement, to “target Hamas operatives.”
Hamas, meanwhile, denied that its members had been operating from within the hospital and accused Israeli forces of storming the facility.

Albina began the interview by discussing the circumstances of her husband’s detention and the last time she saw him:
“I have not been separated from him since the beginning of the war, and he never left Kamal Adwan Hospital. He insisted on staying there out of concern for the wounded and the sick. So we remained inside the hospital until the very last moment, when Israeli forces stormed it, ordered us to evacuate, and informed us that they intended to shut the hospital down.”
Albina said that from the very beginning her husband had refused to leave the hospital for his own safety. Instead, he proposed a gradual evacuation plan to the Israeli military: first the patients and wounded, then the medical staff, and finally himself.
She continued:
“But we were surprised when they forcibly entered the hospital and compelled the women to leave, after assuring us that all the male medical staff would join us at the Indonesian Hospital. We believed them, and the women left for the Indonesian Hospital. We arrived there around ten o’clock at night, but none of the male medical staff joined us. Later we learned that they had all been taken for questioning.
At ten o’clock the following morning, some of the medical staff were released, but Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and ten others remained in detention and under interrogation. Since then, I have heard nothing about my husband, and I do not know where he is being held.”

An Israeli military spokesperson stated that the evacuation operation was being conducted “in coordination and cooperation with the Coordination and Liaison Administration, local health authorities, and international organizations.”
However, Eid Sabah, head of nursing at the hospital, told the BBC on Friday morning that the military had given hospital administrators only fifteen minutes to evacuate patients and staff into the hospital courtyard.

“All of Gaza Needs Him”
Describing the moments leading up to the raid and her husband’s detention, Albina Abu Safiya said:
“The shelling intensified dramatically. The archives department, maintenance department, hospital courtyard, and even the operating room caught fire, causing numerous cases of suffocation due to smoke spreading throughout the facility.
The shelling also struck homes near the hospital. We could clearly hear people trapped beneath the rubble calling for help, but we were unable to assist them. When an ambulance crew attempted to respond, it was attacked by a quadcopter drone, and all members of the crew were killed.
Nor did the effects of the shelling end there. Metal fragments from explosive-laden robots used by the Israeli army during the hospital raid scattered and struck a patient connected to a ventilator in the intensive care unit, as well as the nurse caring for him. The situation was extremely difficult.”

Regarding any information she may have received about her husband’s condition, Albina stressed that she had received none. However, she said that doctors who had been released from detention told her they had been beaten and tortured, according to her account. She repeated her demand to know where her husband was being held and what condition he was in.

When asked what message she would send to her detained husband if he could hear her, she sighed deeply and asked in astonishment and helplessness:
“What do I want to tell him? What do I want to tell him?”
She then added:
“All of Gaza wants him… all of Gaza wants him. The entire medical staff is waiting for him.”
Albina emphasized that her husband paid no attention to anything happening outside the hospital walls and that all of his efforts and concentration since the start of the war had been devoted to helping the wounded and the sick and saving lives. She said:
“Abu Safiya did everything he could to save the lives of the wounded despite the complete lack of the medical resources needed to do so. I personally saw wounded people whose limbs had been torn apart. Because there were not enough surgeons to deal with all these cases, my husband—whose specialty is pediatrics—together with internal medicine doctors, volunteered to perform surgeries and help people.”

At the end of the interview, Albina reflected on the love story that united her with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He had come to Kazakhstan to study medicine, where the two met and fell in love. Their relationship eventually led her to leave everything behind and move with him to northern Gaza in 1996.
She noted that she has never abandoned either him or the people of Gaza, despite the fact that she and all of her children hold foreign citizenship.
She concluded by renewing her call for her husband’s release so that they could once again be together as they had been before.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was born on November 21, 1973, in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. His family originally came from the town of Hamama in the Ashkelon district and was displaced in 1948. He is regarded as one of the leading medical figures in Gaza and holds Palestinian board certifications in pediatrics and neonatology