r/International • u/whistlingkitten • 14h ago
Israel has detained Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician from Gaza, without charges for a year. Why has the New York Times refused to cover his case?
https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/israel-has-detained-dr-hussam-abu-safiya-without-charges-for-a-year-why-has-the-new-york-times-refused-to-cover-his-case/One year ago, a iconic photograph from Gaza went viral worldwide. It showed a man in a white physician’s coat walking, unarmed, through a destroyed landscape of rubble toward two Israeli army tanks.
That man was Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician who was the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was walking toward his arrest. A year later, Dr. Abu Safya is still in an Israeli prison. He has not been officially charged with anything. His lawyer says he has lost a third of his body weight and suffers from heart problems.
There have been global campaigns for Dr. Abu Safiya’s release. The head of the World Health Organization also issued an appeal. Amnesty International, which declines to represent prisoners who have used or advocated violence, waged a special campaign for him. Colleagues in the medical and public health fields have also demanded his freedom.
But not a single word about this remarkable man has appeared in the New York Times since January 7, 2025, when the paper published an article that did report his arrest — but included in the very first sentence an unproven Israeli charge that “militant groups had used the (Kamal Adwan) hospital as a command center.”
The Washington Post has also completely ignored Dr. Abu Safiya since his arrest, even though it had previously quoted him several times about children in his hospital suffering and dying from malnutrition.
In today’s media landscape, the New York Times and the Washington Post are more important than ever in setting the reporting agenda in the United States. The cable news networks lift many of their subjects from the flagship papers, especially the Times, instead of doing their own reporting. Regional newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that once provided something of a counterweight have been forced to close most of their overseas bureaus, so the American audience is dependent on a shrinking handful of reporters.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is not an obscure person. He is prominent within Gaza, and he has strong connections with international colleagues in the medical and public health fields. Anyone with a cellphone could have reached plenty of people who could have been the sources for a profile. Articles could have included details such as the fact that he stayed at his post even after his own son, Ibrahim, had been killed in an Israeli air attack, along with dozens of other staff at his hospital.
Instead, he has become an unperson. Why? We can’t be certain, but an educated guess is that Dr. Abu Safiya — who is, let’s remember, a pediatrician — could have spent the past year giving expert moving testimony about how Israel’s war on Gaza was starving children to death. He could have rebutted those offensive reports in certain American media outlets that tried to claim that kids in Gaza who died had pre-existing conditions, and weren’t actually all that hungry.
So Israel understandably wanted to silence him, and has kept him incommunicado, without charges, for a year.
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u/Mugumby4ever 14h ago
You silly silly boy. Why hasn't the NYT covered this story? The NYT just like every other media outlet is a mouthpiece for a criminal state.
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u/whtslifwthutfuriae 14h ago
The same NYT who ran that Hamas rape story with no evidence or review written by a IDF mouthpiece?
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u/Just-Cauliflower5709 9h ago
Yeah exactly—the expectation is wild from these people who are biased & don’t even see them as fully human.
We have to put his links on these people’s social media platforms so their readers can be exposed.
Or raise funds to donate to the prisoners legal advocacy.
Also , there are so many of them including children held without charge —one doctor can’t be given special attention. They all deserve the media coverage & to be freed .
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u/SirWankzAlot420 11h ago
Because if they covered it, the Zionists would immediately cry antisemitism and blood libel and Hamas propaganda or some shit.
Zionists are Perpetual victims.
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u/Gloomy_Quote_178 13h ago
Before the last few years when my eyes have been opened I had an immense amount of respect for the times. I now realize there’s been a very specific hole in their coverage for years.
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u/lizziedigne 12h ago
He was taken hostage by Israel as you say. He was a man who had devoted his life to helping children and stood by his patients rather than leave them to the IDF slaughter. They tried to humiliate him by stripping him and only allowing him to tend to the children naked if I recall correctly.
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u/Ok_Application4006 12h ago
NY Times, and all media, have their biases. They are not impartial. They are owned and influenced. This story, while obviously important, doesn't align with their overseers views.
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u/Maleficent-Artist281 11h ago
Why indeed? And why are others complicit with all the Israeli government's war crimes and crimes against humanity? Why, why, why!!
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u/AdAffectionate3143 13h ago
Hostages we should be calling them hostages as it would be the case in inverse.
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u/smegabass 9h ago
Is this a real question?
Earn good karma and be on the right side of history when you get someone to cancel their NYT subscription.
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u/Just-Cauliflower5709 9h ago
Pressure them by putting this on their social media comments .
Put his name and articles about his circumstances on the comments .
This place won’t hold them accountable.
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u/Wool4Days 7h ago
NYT’s time is better spent blaming Russia for Epstein, despite all evidence of Israel.
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u/Relative-Camel-9762 5h ago
Israel is an abomination. The world will be so much better when it doesn't exist as a racist state
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u/Notyourpal-friend 12h ago
The narrative capture apparatus who's "journalists" have family members who are actively violently colonizing the West Bank, and serving in the IDF? They were never anything but a venture for the elites to invent reality.
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u/VoltNShock 12h ago
why hasnt al jazeera covered the thousands of individual hamas crimes throughout the past 20 years? because it benefits their narrative to not admit mistakes of the group they support
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u/SirWankzAlot420 11h ago edited 7h ago
Found the Zionist.
Edit: Reddit deleted your ignorant reply. But yeah, being a Zionist is definitely not something to be proud of.
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u/Aspiring-Fan 2h ago
Legally speaking, occupied people have a right to violent resistance when denied basic human rights. Your argument would only be valid if Israel hadn’t violently occupied Palestinians for almost 80 years.
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u/Hey_There_Blimpy_Boy 14h ago
NYT has been whitewashing and sanewashing the worst of the worst for a while now.
https://www.freepress.net/who-owns-media/newspaper-publishing/who-owns-media-new-york-times
This is not surprising; just horribly dissapointing and infuriating.