Man of the Year

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya

Paediatrician and Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Northern Gaza

On 27 December 2024, a paediatrician in a white coat walked out of a burning hospital in northern Gaza, across rubble, towards two Israeli armoured vehicles. The photograph became one of the defining images of the Gaza genocide. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, has not been free since. He is The Muslim 500’s Man of the Year for 2027: a doctor who refused to abandon his patients, buried his son and returned to the wards, and has now spent more than six hundred days in Israeli custody without charge or trial.

The last hospital in the north

Kamal Adwan, in Beit Lahiya, was by late 2024 the last major functioning medical facility in the North Gaza governorate. Israeli forces had already raided it in December 2023 and again in October 2024, detaining staff and patients on each occasion. Abu Safiya, a paediatrician by training, was its director and its most prominent voice. Through the war he documented attacks on medical facilities, described the shortages of fuel, oxygen and medicines, and appealed to the international community to protect what remained of Gaza’s health system. Amnesty International has described him as one of the most prominent voices of Gaza’s decimated healthcare sector.

The siege and the refusal

On 5 October 2024 Israel imposed a blockade on northern Gaza. For the next 84 days the Kamal Adwan Hospital was surrounded, cut off, and repeatedly struck. Abu Safiya was ordered to evacuate it completely, and refused. His reasoning was simple: the building held critically ill children, newborns and many wounded people, and a large number of them could not be moved. In late October, his son Ibrahim was killed by an Israeli drone at the gate of the hospital. Abu Safiya, still in his medical coat, led the funeral prayer in the hospital courtyard, and said he believed his son had been killed to punish him for staying. On 23 November, shrapnel from a drone strike wounded him as he left the operating theatre. Colleagues later described him hobbling through the wards on a crutch, steadying a depleted team. He did not leave.

Arrest and disappearance

On 27 December 2024 Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, ordered patients and staff out, and set the building alight. Abu Safiya was the last to leave, walking towards the armoured vehicles to discuss the evacuation of those still inside. He was detained, along with other medical staff and patients. The Israeli military initially denied holding him, and the World Health Organization (WHO) reported losing contact with him after the raid. Gaza’s health ministry said he had been beaten. A month later Israel alleged, without publicly providing evidence, that he had been involved in “terrorist activities” and held a rank in Hamas.

Held without charge

Abu Safiya has since been detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits detention without charge on the basis of evidence the authorities treat as confidential. On 28 April 2026 a district court extended his detention. On 16 June 2026 the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, allowing detention to continue until at least October. Since 3 June he has been held in solitary confinement, beyond the 15 consecutive days Amnesty International says is permitted. His son Elias says he has been kept in the Nafha desert prison, barred from meeting his lawyer for more than 50 days, and subjected to beatings. UN experts have called for his immediate release after reports of “severe torture”, and Amnesty International reports that he is denied adequate healthcare. By late August 2026 he had completed 600 days in custody.

The campaign for his freedom

His case has become the focal point of a worldwide campaign. Amnesty International has issued urgent appeals and launched public campaigns calling for his immediate and unconditional release, the WHO has supported calls for his release, and health workers from Dublin to New York have rallied under the banner #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya. In Israel itself, a small public demonstration in Tel Aviv demanded his release—a rare act of dissent during the war. His family, led by his eldest son, have campaigned tirelessly from abroad. Physicians for Human Rights Israel is petitioning for the release of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza, including Dr Abu Safiya, all held without charge.

Israel’s position

The Israeli military maintains that Kamal Adwan Hospital was used as a Hamas stronghold and that Abu Safiya held a rank in the organisation. Although the military has not made its evidence public, Israeli courts have upheld his detention on the basis of classified material that has not been disclosed publicly. His family, colleagues at the charity MedGlobal, and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, which represented him, completely reject the allegations, saying he only performed medical and administrative duties.

A wider pattern

Abu Safiya is not an isolated case. Of Gaza’s 37 hospitals, none is now fully functional, and more than 1,800 health facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Dozens of Gaza’s doctors remain in Israeli custody; Physicians for Human Rights Israel is campaigning for 14 of them. Colleagues and family often cite the fate of Dr Adnan al-Bursh, an orthopaedic surgeon from Gaza who died in Israeli detention in 2024 after being held without charge, and fear a similar end for Abu Safiya. Israel says its detention practices comply with the law, but access for the Red Cross and independent monitors has been severely limited.

Why he is honoured

Abu Safiya embodies a principle older than any of the laws now tested by this war: that a physician’s duty runs to the patient in front of him. His case also stands for the many other doctors and health workers who have paid a personal price in order to care for the sick and vulnerable. Amnesty describes Abu Safiya’s detention as reflecting the systematic targeting of Palestinian health workers and the decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system. A man with no army, no office and no freedom has done more than most governments to remind the world what courage and integrity look like.

Statistics

• Detained 27 December 2024; 600+ days held without charge
• Kamal Adwan Hospital raided December 2023, October 2024, December 2024
• Supreme Court upheld detention 16 June 2026, until at least October 2026

Woman of the Year

Fatemeh Zahra Sheikhabadi

Survivor of the Shajareh Tayyebeh School attack, Minab, Iran — honoured together with her classmates and teachers

On the morning of 28 February 2026, a schoolgirl named Fatemeh Zahra Sheikhabadi picked up her bag and walked to Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, in southern Iran, expecting an ordinary day. She played with her friends in the yard, then her school was struck by missiles, twice, and the people she loved were killed around her. She survived. The Muslim 500 names her Woman of the Year for 2027, and asks that the honour be understood as hers together with every child and teacher who did not come home that day: her classmates, her friends, the women who taught her, and the parents who had come to collect their children when the second missile fell. She is named because she survived and chose to speak, so that the honour may give voice to those who were silenced and bear witness to the innocent lives that were taken.

An ordinary morning

Minab is a coastal town in Hormozgan province, home to many families from Iran’s Baluch minority. Shajareh Tayyebeh—the name means “Good Tree”—was a small coeducational primary school, a girls’ floor above a boys’ and pre-school section downstairs, the kind of building with murals on the walls and a blue gate children recognised from a distance. On 28 February Fatemeh Zahra was in the playground with her friends when the first missile hit. A second struck shortly after, as teachers were gathering frightened children into the prayer hall for safety and parents were arriving at the gate to take their children home.

What she has said

Fatemeh Zahra later travelled to Geneva to address the UN Human Rights Council in person. She described herself as a child who, like any other, wanted to go to school, learn, and play with her friends. She said she saw her friends and her teachers lose their lives in front of her, and that she witnessed things no child should ever see. She asked the representatives of the world’s governments to hear the voices of the children of Minab. Her statement, on the Right to Education, was met with thirty seconds of silence in the chamber. Another survivor, the teacher Amaineh Nademi, has described the same moments: the blast that threw her and her pupils across the room, blood pouring from the injured, the building collapsing around them. “What was the crime that the students committed?” she asked afterwards.

The friends she lost

Among the dead was seven-year-old Makan Nasiri, a first-grader; nothing of him was recoverable from the rubble beyond a sweater and a shoe, and his grave in Minab’s cemetery holds no remains. His teacher, Mandana Salari, was killed in the same strike, alongside her own daughter, a pupil in the same school. Nasim Neyestani, who taught second grade, had already sent 14 of her pupils home with their parents before the missile struck her classroom; her mother now visits her grave daily. A boy named Muhammad Taha should have turned ten that evening; his family marked the birthday at his graveside instead. Not far away, a grandfather named Heydar Sadeghi lost his grandson Hami in the strike, while Hami’s nine-year-old sister survived; most evenings he still sits on a bench by the ruined school, and goes home afterwards, he says, to dance in front of the girl who lived.

A school marked for a decade

Reporting by Sky News and the research group Forensic Architecture found that Shajareh Tayyebeh had appeared, clearly labelled as a primary school, on publicly available maps for more than ten years. There was no ambiguity about what the building was. The tragedy was not that its identity was unknown, but that this knowledge did not prevent a place where children learned from becoming a place where children died.

Who is responsible

The missiles that killed Fatemeh Zahra’s classmates and teachers were fired by the United States, as part of the war it launched against Iran alongside Israel on 28 February 2026. A United Nations fact-finding mission later found reasonable grounds to believe US forces were responsible, and concluded that the attack was indiscriminate and therefore a war crime: it found no evidence the school was used for any military purpose, and that intelligence placing a commander at the site had not been properly verified before the missiles were launched. The United States has not published its own investigation and has called conclusions of wrongdoing premature. None of that diminishes what happened to a schoolyard full of children, and the governments that fought that war, and no one else, are responsible for it.

Living with it

Minab’s cemetery now has a section set aside for the dead of Shajareh Tayyebeh, and families gather at the ruined school most evenings to grieve. The gate still carries the paintings that once welcomed children: a map of Iran, oversized pencils, portraits of scientists and poets. Fatemeh Zahra Sheikhabadi goes on living in the town where it happened, carrying the memory of a morning no child should have had to survive, let alone describe to a hall of diplomats an ocean away.

Why she is honoured

This publication has, in other years, honoured ministers, generals and scholars whose power over others was the measure of their influence. Fatemeh Zahra Sheikhabadi has no power over anyone. What she has is a memory she did not choose, and the courage to put it into words rather than let it stay silent. She is honoured not as a symbol of a war, but as herself: a girl who lost her friends and her teachers on an ordinary morning, and who lived to tell their story so that it would not be lost with them. One day, if the courts and the fact-finders ever finish their work, there may be a formal accounting of who is culpable. Until then, the clearest account of what happened at Shajareh Tayyebeh is hers: a schoolbag, a yard full of friends, a morning that did not stay ordinary, and a silence in Geneva that lasted thirty seconds for a loss that will last much longer.

Statistics

• 28 February 2026: two missile strikes on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, Minab
• Addressed the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva, 18 June 2026
• UN fact-finding mission: the attack was indiscriminate and a war crime (September 2026)