On December 30, 2024, Al Jazeera reported that Dr. Ahmad Abu Safiya, Director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, was detained at an Israeli army camp. Abu Safiya was not just a doctor; he was an outspoken figure who often recorded and spoke out against the violation of human rights and international law by Israel, especially concerning the very same hospital he worked at. The Kamal Adwan Hospital had already been bombed and raided and Abu Safiya had been on the ground orienting himself to protect the sick and injured. He was not simply doing his job: he was acting out the ethical heart of being a doctor in a war. His actions were not neutral; they were acts of care with moral and political implications.

But Israel viewed him differently. To them, he was an “unlawful combatant,” a term that in essence denies a person protection under international law. This designation becomes (and in this case, was) the gap that allows the State of Israel to detain someone without trial and without articulating any charges, without any accountability to the world at large. According to the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, a Palestinian N.G.O., Abu Safiya subsequently endured degrading and inhumane treatment once arrested. This is not an isolated event; it is an expression of a systematic approach by Israel with respect to Palestinian political prisoners vis-a-vis the fair trial rights to which they are entitled; i.e. no fair trial, denial of the data to form charges against them, and impossible extrication of themselves from their dilemma. It is termed “administrative detention,” but in truth the term offers little indication of the human form of alienation it represents.

The inhumane treatment has resulted in a shock not only among Abu Safiya’s family members such as his mother, who died of heart attack because of her son’s situation, but among Palestinians and pro-Palestinians across the globe. Specifically, Abu Safiya had expressed a different form of resistance and sought a different style of liberation. First, he resisted by endeavoring to protect the lives of those inside the hospital and with similar roles, then he tried to raise awareness in this concern. Indeed this made me think of the high ethics of his career and the socio-humanistic implications of such a career, connecting this to Enrique Dussel’s work of “Ethics of Liberation,” whose ideas are applicable to colonial contexts. Dussel’s work explores the way peoples respond to systems and powers that seek to dehumanize the human being, eliminating, suppressing, and even hegemonizing the lives of humans.

The example of Abu Safiya and the treatment he suffered confirms that this is not an incidental event with no meaning. Given the role he played societally in these very difficult times across the entire city of Gaza, Abu Safiya actually represents a very essential example to the claim that political imprisonment, in this scenario, has purposes of targeting the human, ethical, and political dimensions: the humanity of the person himself, the ethical dimension in the medical career, and even the political character of the societal role he played as a citizen, who has a sense of belonging to Gaza. Simply, Abu Safiya, in Dussel’s terms, was the “Other,” who had no influences and was usually an object of marginalization and exclusion by the dominant groups, or the colonial systems as in this case. Abu Safiya’s role fundamentally represents liberation as an ethical task, particularly in the case of the war, where social activism, humanitarian efforts, and medical roles are all required to face and stand firm against the oppressive—violent tide.

Ethics of liberation perhaps have in their substance political or philosophical dimensions, but in actuality, when imagined in this context, ethics are presented as humanistic, conveying the roles of surviving people and protecting the souls even by attempting the last chances of that.

Medical ethics, in their liberational form, must not be indifferent to injustice. Rather they have, at a minimum, a positive burden to not be complicit. Dussel’s position is that ethics are, at their core, about “hearing the cries of the oppressed” and the need to re-work systems that seek to dominate and dehumanize. The acts of torturing and imprisoning a doctor without trial have forms of imposed obligation that move those acts outside of legal contexts; it adds the element of obligation, which is ethical, to expose such policies. To respond to this is to do what citizens, and those engaged in the local and international human rights movement as well as international public health organizations, can do. In this case, nothing may be an act of deliberative resistance. Dussel’s second level of “what is possible” warns us not to only think of what is ethical but what can be done in the context of orders of oppression.

Demanding international involvement, appealing to human rights to expose abuse, and equally, demanding the release of Abu Safiya, may not overthrow the order, but it makes a demand that brings positive life force in a grand and subtle way. In the act of being dominated these become liberatory acts. In Dussel’s perspective, this is colonial modernity in the name of “legitimacy,” or using legitimization in the name of a legal order against a system of dehumanization. Eventually, illustrating it from a medical perspective, liberation is more than just following the rules or regulations. The decision to see, hear, and act in support of life is what it is all about: a moral awakening. In this era of globalization and exclusion, ethics must be political. Additionally, they need to be medical, as apparent in Dr. Abu Safiya’s case.