A good deal of what the world thinks it knows about the supposed “genocide” in Gaza is due to the efforts of Hussam Abu Safyia. In October 2023 and December 2024, Safyia penned two guest essays in the New York Times, giving agog Times readers the lurid, gritty details of what it was like to try to do the work of a physician while the rapacious Israeli war machine racked up ever more innocent victims.
The Times identified him as a pediatrician, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, and MedGlobal’s lead physician in Gaza. There was just one little detail of Safyia’s resume that the Times didn’t bother to mention: Hussam Abu Safyia was a Hamas operative.
The New York Post reported Saturday that Safyia is “a colonel with terror group Hamas,” and was “photographed wearing a Hamas camo military uniform while at a gathering of Hamas elites to celebrate the completion of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in 2016, according to the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor.” Also, Safyia’s “photo appeared on the Gaza Medical Services‘ Facebook page — a group overseen by the Hamas-run health ministry.”
Safyia himself didn’t see fit to disclose that he had anything to do with Hamas when the Times published his first op-ed, “I’m a Pediatrician in Gaza. Please Save Us From This Horror,” on Oct. 29, 2023, just three weeks after Hamas jihadis murdered 1,200 Israelis. Instead, he expatiated at length about the difficulties of working in a hospital in Gaza, working hard to give the impression that the Israelis were gratuitously bombing hospitals and other civilian facilities, apparently with no provocation (or, of course, justification) at all. He doesn’t, of course, say anything about how Hamas used hospitals as command-and-control centers so that any Israeli action against them could be portrayed as a gratuitous attack on civilians who were already suffering.
In his Dec. 2, 2024, piece, Safyia was more strident than he had been the year before, complaining that “we feel as if the rest of the world is wrapped up in a different world from the one we are in. We are suffering and paying the price of the genocide that is happening to our people here in the northern Gaza Strip.”
Yet as the Post noted, “neither Safyia nor the Times disclosed his alleged affiliation with the terror group, even though Palestinian media refers to him by his military rank. He is also referred to as a colonel in a 2020 Facebook post on the Gaza Strip Medical Services page.” That post went up on Oct. 14, 2020, fully three years before Safyia wrote his first essay for the New York Times, so it would be difficult for the Paper of Record to plead ignorance and claim that it had no idea when it published him that Hussam Abu Safyia was a Hamas colonel.
That means that the choice is this: either the New York Times, which still styles itself as the touchstone of journalistic excellence, failed to perform due diligence and didn’t do even the most rudimentary investigation of the background of this Hamas operative before publishing him, or the Times knew all along that Safyia was a Hamas official and didn’t care, and intentionally misled its readers into thinking he was just a humanitarian-minded physician appalled at all the human suffering he supposedly was dealing with in Gaza. So the New York Times is either incompetent, publishing Hamas operatives without knowing it is doing so, or evil, publishing Hamas operatives without disclosing their Hamas affiliation.
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Safyia’s Hamas allegiance also casts into doubt everything he claims in his two Times op-eds. Hamas had ample reason to dissemble about alleged IDF atrocities: the leftist establishment media was particularly credulous after the Oct. 7 attacks, and eager to have news of Israeli misdeeds. Hamas took immediate advantage of this, giving the world the fanciful Israeli “genocide” narrative that the left still takes for granted as being axiomatically true.
Safyia’s op-eds are one-sided, selectively reported, and extremely misleading, designed to make the world hate Israel and think of the Gaza population, which has been marinating in hatred and bloodlust for decades, as made up almost wholly of wise and stoically suffering grandmothers.
If the Times had told its readers that Safyia was a Hamas colonel, maybe his words wouldn’t have been received with the same seriousness and consternation that did, in fact, greet them. Maybe these essays would have been seen for what they were: skillfully constructed propaganda pieces designed to curry sympathy for Hamas. But the Times knows better than to label its Hamas propaganda as such. And even now that Safyia has been unmasked, many will still assume that everything he said was Allah’s honest truth. After all, it was in the New York Times.
The New York Times will just move on from Hussam Abu Safyia, unrepentant. For accountability and accurate reporting, you need PJ Media. Become a VIP member today — you'll get all our content and a blissful ad-free experience. Use code FIGHT for 60% off.
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