It has been one week since the Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, was detained by Israeli forces. Reports indicate he is being held inside a notorious torture facility, but Israeli officials won’t confirm where he is.

For 75 days, doctors in this north Gaza hospital have withstood the Israeli army’s attempts to forcibly evacuate them and their patients. In the face of death, the doctors are still refusing to leave, even as the army steps up its attacks.

Over more than a year of war, I have volunteered to help my people in Gaza, wrapping friends and family into shrouds, but also helping bring new life into the world.

I am in my final year in medical school and have seen hundreds of critical cases as a volunteer doctor during Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. The traumas I have seen in my patients are no different from those I have experienced myself.

In a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah discusses the liberatory potential of medicine, the genocidal nature of Zionism, and the obligation, when confronted with the logic of elimination, to remain unwavering in our commitment to life. 

When I left Gaza two weeks ago, my colleagues at the European Hospital in Khan Younis were already overwhelmed. Now, they are terrified Israel will invade the hospital and kill patients like they did at nearby Nasser Hospital.

In the sterile field of medicine, mention of culpability or politics amounts to contamination. In the colonial situation, doctors can’t afford this narrow a definition of health, or of life–diagnosis requires context.

Israel is putting its commitment to Jewish supremacy above the functioning of its healthcare system, proposing rejecting graduates of Palestinian universities in favor of “Jewish purity.”