A decade-old photograph resurfaced on Saturday showing Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, wearing a Hamas uniform alongside other senior officers in the terror group.
Abu Safiya holds the rank of colonel in Hamas’s Military Medical Services, according to the MMS and Palestinian media reports. The MMS is separate from Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, though its members directly participated in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror onslaught of southern Israel.
Israel detained Abu Safiya along with nearly 240 others during a raid on the medical facility in December 2024, alleging that Hamas was using the military hospital as a command center.
The photo was shared on Saturday by the NGO Monitor Group. It was uploaded to the MMS Facebook page a decade ago, and shows a gathering of top Hamas officers in the terror group’s National Security Forces and MMS celebrating the completion of the hospital, according to a report in The New York Post, citing the advocacy group.
According to the newspaper, a Facebook post uploaded on the Gaza Strip Medical Services page in 2020 also referred to Abu Safiya as a colonel.
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Abu Safiya remains held in Israeli custody, and his lawyers have claimed he was subjected to “severe physical abuse,” including beating and electric shocks.
He was also reportedly injured in an Israeli drone strike on Kamal Adwan Hospital weeks before his arrest.
NGO Monitor Senior Researcher @vincent_chebat found a photo of Abu Safyia wearing a Hamas uniform while “at a gathering of Hamas elites…including Gen. Abu Obaida Al-Jarrah, Director of Military Medical Services Saeed Saoudi and National Security Forces commander Col. Naeem… pic.twitter.com/Xn9GDzcDlA
— NGO Monitor (@NGOmonitor) January 31, 2026
In October, a source from Hamas told CNN that Israel had decided against releasing the hospital director as part of a US-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Abu Safiya had two opinion pieces published in The New York Times condemning Israel’s campaign in Gaza. The newspaper did not note the Hamas affiliation in either item.
The first opinion piece was published on October 29, 2023, less than a month after the start of the fighting in Gaza. The second was published on December 2, 2024, weeks before he was arrested by Israeli forces.
The IDF has previously said Abu Safiya was a high-ranking Hamas operative, but did not accuse him of participating in any specific acts of terror.
Another director of Kamal Adwan, Ahmed Kahlot, who was captured by the IDF earlier in the war, revealed in an interrogation that the MMS-affiliated hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point it housed a kidnapped soldier.
According to Kahlot, who himself has been a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, some 16 members of the hospital’s staff – including doctors, nurses and paramedics – are also Hamas operatives who serve in the al-Qassam Brigades.
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