On 13 October 2023, Dr. Baker Abu Safia, 65, a senior surgeon, was on duty in Al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya, northern Gaza.
He received a message in the afternoon from his son: “For God’s sake, come! We want to see you.”
As Israel’s attacks on northern Gaza were intensifying, Abu Safia’s wife and children – who were displaced from Gaza City to Nuseirat – were afraid of losing him.
Abu Safia got in an ambulance already heading to Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, where his family was, and reunited with them for around 15 minutes before a heavy shelling struck near the hospital.
Patients, carried on people’s shoulders, were brought into the hospital.
“I went straight to the operating room,” Abu Safia told The Electronic Intifada, adding that the administration at the hospital already knew who he was.
He finished at 11 pm and returned the next day to Jabaliya’s Al-Awda Hospital.
After he returned, Abu Safia lost contact with his family for almost two weeks as they had, he later knew, moved to a tent in the southern city of Rafah, where there was no internet or mobile phone connection at that time.
First siege
But this ordeal was nothing compared to what Abu Safia was going to face throughout the still ongoing genocide.
In the first week of the genocide, the hospital had already brought in some meals, but as at least 200 people were sheltering there, Abu Safia suggested to the hospital director that they buy more supplies.
They got about 100 sacks of flour and other basics and started making their own meals by baking bread over a fire. The hospital did not have a kitchen.
But despite that, famine crept up to every person in Jabaliya’s Al-Awda Hospital, particularly on 6 December 2023, when the Israeli troops besieged the hospital for the first time.
More than 65 people sought shelter in the hospital, joining those already there – among them newborns, elderly people, staff, patients and their families.
“We all ate the same food: lentils and beans at first, then only rice,” Abu Safia said. “Lunch was a small plate of rice, and dinner was half a loaf of bread. I lost a lot of weight, dropping from 98 kilograms to 75.”
On 7 December, Israel, Abu Safia said, killed a volunteer nurse named Ashraf Abu Dghaim inside the hospital while injuring several other staff members.
When the Israeli snipers blocked the hospital yard, making it a no-go zone, people had, Abu Safia said, to bury the dead in a first-floor room allocated for drivers.
On 16 December, the Israeli troops stormed the hospital and detained the hospital director, Dr. Ahmad Muhanna, and three staff members.
During that siege, the Israeli soldiers would snipe anyone moving through the bridge, which connected Al-Awda Hospital’s two buildings.
On 20 December, the Israeli army announced it was safe to cross, Abu Safia said, and a female worker, Aida Abu al-Nasr, attempted to walk across the bridge, but she was sniped and killed.
So they had to break down a wall between the two buildings just to get from one to the other.
During that time, the third floor, where the patients were, Abu Safia said, was hit, killing three doctors and a companion while about five others sustained injuries.
Sniper attack
Somewhere in the first half of 2024, an Israeli sniper, Abu Safia said, shot a young man in the head, protruding part of his brain.
“There was no way to transfer him” to Kamal Adwan Hospital, which had an intensive care unit, or another nearby facility as the Israeli troops were still besieging Al-Awda Hospital.
“We sat him on the ground and manually ventilated him with a breathing resuscitation bag,” Abu Safia said.
Though Abu Safia told the father that his son would not survive, the father sat beside his son on the ground, ventilating him unstoppably from the afternoon until 5:35 am the next day, when his son died.
Though the siege loosened just a bit, the Israeli army invaded an area near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza during May 2024.
The army then besieged Al-Awda Hospital again and forced everyone out to search it.
“They found nothing,” Abu Safia said.
Though Abu Safia doesn’t recall exactly when, he spoke of how, in the second half of 2024, he barely escaped death.
He went from the reception to his room and, for a moment, sat on the bed in front of a window, which he had closed with a cupboard.
But then, without a specific reason, he got up and went back to the reception.
“Once there, I thought, ‘Why am I here? I was just here,’” Abu Safia said.
When he went back to his room, he found sand and debris on the floor. He looked at the wall and saw two bullets.
“God saved me,” he said. “If I had been sitting there a moment earlier, one bullet would have penetrated my head and the other through my neck.”
Beyond limits
But despite all this danger, Dr. Baker Abu Safia pushed himself beyond the limits, refusing to leave his patients as he, he said, was “the only surgeon in northern Gaza.”
On 16 October 2024, Dr. Baker was managing two operating rooms simultaneously, he said, while two other critical patients waited in the reception area.
Meanwhile, his cousin, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, transferred to him four cases, and, in less than half an hour later, he sent 10 more.
But Baker Abu Safia sorted through these other cases and kept working from 3 pm until 2:45 am, where, in 12 hours, he performed 14 surgeries, including three cases that “needed kidney removal” and other cases involving “damaged spleens, livers or intestines.”
Abu Safia would sometimes perform surgeries that were not his specialty.
His erstwhile colleague, Dr. Said Jouda, would sometimes send him vascular surgery cases.
“It wasn’t my specialty, but I had studied it, and since no one else was there, I did the surgeries,” Abu Safia said. “I never failed a surgery.”
“Some patients needed to be transferred to Gaza for plastic or orthopedic surgery, but since many couldn’t, I did two orthopedic surgeries myself, even though it wasn’t my specialty.”
Abu Safia said that what caused him deep psychological pain, which still affects him, is losing coworkers or watching them get detained.
On 12 December 2024, Dr. Said Jouda was killed when an Israeli tank fired at the car he was in, marked with a Red Crescent sign and a white flag.
Not long after, the Israeli army abducted Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya on 27 December. He is still suffering in Israeli dungeons.
Before the January 2025 ceasefire was announced, the Israeli army besieged Al-Awda Hospital for the third time, blocking all the roads that surrounded the hospital with sand barriers, allowing no cars or even ambulances to get through.
The hospital relied on a small generator to run medical equipment for a few hours daily. Its staff used the remaining fuel to power the operating rooms, reception and lab, limiting surgical procedures to life-saving cases.
Abu Safia said that they had to carry the wounded to the operating rooms with help from others as there were no elevators.
“I can never forget an 8-year-old boy who begged me not to cut his leg,” Abu Safia said. “I promised him that I will do everything I can to save it. And we did.”
After the ceasefire was announced in January 2025, Abu Safia’s family returned to northern Gaza.
When Abu Safia reunited with them and saw his children, he was shocked by how they looked, something that broke him from the inside.
“They looked tanned and had lost a lot of weight,” he said.
After Israel unilaterally ended the January ceasefire, the Israeli army besieged the hospital for the fourth and the last time.
“It was the worst,” Abu Safia said. “I was the only surgeon in northern Gaza, the sole specialist in everything.”
“Even in total darkness and without internet or phone service, we kept working as best we could. The area was emptied, and we were the last to leave,” Abu Safia said of the Israeli army ordering them to evacuate on 28 June 2025.
Those still in Al-Awda Hospital left in health ministry-coordinated vehicles from northern Gaza to Gaza City, he said, as “there was nothing left.”
“There were no supplies, no food, no water,” Abu Safia said. “The hospital could no longer function.”
No one could reach the hospital thereafter.
After the so-called October 2025 ceasefire, Al-Awda Hospital was located behind Israel’s new yellow line.
Abu Safia returned with his family to another apartment he has in Gaza City since his first one is uninhabitable after being burned by the Israeli army.
“But we endure. I continue to work,” he said of working in Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. “Inshallah, this will ease one day.”
Samah Zaher Zaqout is a Gaza-based writer, lecturer at University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS), online tutor and translator.
