A tortured pediatrician in an Israeli prison, a Chilean abstention that breaks thirty years of history, and a question at La Moneda that no one wants to answer: when did we stop being the country of “never again”?
His name is Hussam Abu Safiya. He is a pediatrician. He ran the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, and he kept treating patients even after an Israeli drone killed his son. On 27 December 2024, Israeli forces stormed the hospital and took him away. Since then, he has been imprisoned without charges, without trial, without sentence, under a legal framework called the Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows a person to be held indefinitely on evidence that no one sees. On 16 June 2026, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected his appeal. On 2 July, his lawyer came out of a visit and described what he had seen: a man almost unrecognisable from the beatings, struggling to breathe, on the verge of losing consciousness. He warned that his life is in imminent danger. That is to say: while you are reading this, a doctor is agonising in a cell for the crime of not having abandoned his patients.
And the question, uncomfortable, Chilean, is this: are we going to sit around waiting for the news of his death? Just like that, without further ado, because a fuckwit like the one who now occupies La Moneda couldn’t give a shit about the matter, and with him the whole caste that plays at politics without the faintest idea of what it represents?
Because Chile had something to say about this and chose not to say it. On 22 May 2026, at the 79th World Health Assembly, decision WHA79(9) — approved by eighty-nine votes in favour, five against, and thirty-one abstentions — called on the World Health Organization to report on and act against the destruction of the Palestinian health system: attacks on hospitals, ambulances and medical personnel, the blockade of aid, the imposed famine. Chile abstained. It did not vote against: it did something worse, it stepped aside. Between 1990 and 2025, the country had backed that text every year, except for 2009. The 2026 abstention breaks a state policy of more than three decades, upheld by right-wing and left-wing governments alike. And it occurred just weeks after Chile itself voted, at the Human Rights Council, against illegal settlements and in favour of Palestinian self-determination. The contradiction is not an oversight. It is the X-ray of a government that no longer knows — or no longer wants — to uphold what it represented.
It is no coincidence. Back in 2018, when visiting the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, José Antonio Kast — now in La Moneda — described it as an impressive memorial, but one that has “a problem of origin.” That the man who now governs should speak of a “problem of origin” before the very place that documents state torture is not a museological observation: it is a statement of principles about which memory counts and which is surplus. And foreign policy is, in the end, the projection of that same hierarchy onto the world.
What Chile abstained from condemning has a technical name, and it is not a slip of the tongue: medicide. That is what UN rapporteurs Tlaleng Mofokeng — a South African doctor, Special Rapporteur on the right to health — and Francesca Albanese — an Italian jurist, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories — called it: the deliberate destruction of the health system as a method for making the life of a people unliveable, a calculated component of genocide. The figures from the WHO itself bear this out: more than seven hundred attacks on healthcare in Gaza between October 2023 and June 2025, close to a thousand deaths among health workers and patients, hospitals razed, more than fifteen hundred health workers killed. Abu Safiya is not a tragic exception: he is the face of a policy. And in the face of that policy, Chile raised its hand to refrain from commitment.
Here we must pause, because what is broken is not a vote: it is an inheritance. Chilean foreign policy after 1990 was not just any diplomacy. It was born of the never again. It was built on the memory of our own disappeared, our own tortured, our own executed. The Rettig (1991) and Valech (2004) reports were not merely an internal reckoning: they were the moral foundation that allowed Chile to speak to the world about human rights with authority. The memory of our victims was the basis for defending others. On that basis we ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2009), recognised the State of Palestine in 2011, and we host the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, which made this cause transversal and not one-sided.
And there is a node that makes all of this almost unbearably ironic. In October 1998, Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London under an order from Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón invoking universal jurisdiction for torture. That case is a cornerstone of international criminal law: it established that not even an ex-dictator is safe from answering for torture. Chile’s experience helped build the global scaffolding against the impunity of torture. And today a Chilean government abstains on resolutions that document torture. Albanese’s March 2026 report is bluntly titled Torture and Genocide. The country that taught the world that torture never lapses looks the other way when torture occurs. This is not amnesia. It is abdication.
None of this is an isolated vote. With Kast in power since March 2026, the Geneva abstention fits a pattern: the abstention at the OEA before a declaration on the protection of rights, on the argument that the language generated division; and the withdrawal of Chile as a full member of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People — a membership managed by the outgoing administration — now downgraded to mere observer. Three gestures, one direction: the emptying of the human rights component. The government will call it a technicality. But a technicality repeated in the same direction ceases to be a procedural accident and becomes doctrine.
Where does so much fuckwittery come from?
Let us say it in so many words, because there is no word that better describes the mix of emboldened ignorance, irresponsibility, and contempt that defines the phenomenon. But watch out: the fuckwittery we are speaking of is not individual foolishness, not a clumsy official who pressed the wrong button. It is a method. And to understand it, one must raise one’s gaze, because what is happening at La Moneda is merely the provincial version of something much larger.
Contemporary scholars of dehumanisation converge on an uncomfortable idea: dehumanising the other is not the barbarism that assaults the West from outside, but rather one of its internal operations, the reverse of the very project that proclaimed the rights of man. David Livingstone Smith — American philosopher at the University of New England, specialising in the theory of dehumanisation — reminds us in Less than Human (2011) that those who dehumanise are not monsters, but us, and that this mechanism works as a psychological lubricant that dissolves inhibitions and makes the unthinkable thinkable. The social psychologist Herbert Kelman, of Harvard, had already shown this in 1973: dehumanising the victim suspends the moral brake of the perpetrator. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe named it necropolitics (2003): the sovereign power to decide who lives and who dies, which is not the exception but the hidden face of modern sovereignty. The Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage — separated in 2024 from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for his positions on Gaza — speaks of cultures of exterminability, grammars that the West administers instead of suffering. The Palestinian jurist and feminist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes, with her concept of unchilding (2019), how colonial power expels children from the very domain of childhood to kill them without guilt. And it is no coincidence that several of them have been punished for naming what they name: Hage was dismissed in Germany; Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended by her university and arrested by the Israeli police. Dehumanisation is also exercised against those who denounce it.
What these authors describe as structure, the present displays as style. And therein lies the novelty of the age: the contradiction always existed, but previously it was disguised. For decades the liberal order needed the alibi — human rights as liturgy, hypocrisy as the tribute that vice pays to virtue — and that disguise was, in its own way, a recognition of the norm. What Trump, Milei, Netanyahu, and, on a provincial scale, Kast embody is the abandonment of the disguise: transgression in plain sight as a display of power, flaunted impunity as a method. And that brazenness is not strength: it is the last resort of those who can no longer legitimise themselves through facts, and who replace legitimacy with cynicism. It is not that they do not know it is wrong. It is that in a system that trades only in the measurable, what cannot be measured is destroyed, and law, the norm, and the victim have lost their price. Cynicism is not moral blindness: it is morality drained of exchange value. They act knowingly, and they could not give a damn that we know.
Chile already saw that unmasking up close, in its own home. The Church that made morality its public banner protected its own for decades: the Karadima case — the priest found guilty by the Vatican in 2011 of abusing minors, whose cover-up network dragged the entire Chilean episcopate into a mass resignation before the Pope in 2018 — is the domestic emblem of the dissociation between the pious sign and the criminal referent. This is not about imputing that case to anyone in particular, but about naming the structure: a power that crosses itself in public and, in the same gesture, shields yesterday’s perpetrator and abandons today’s victim. Karadima was the local rehearsal of a logic that now operates globally and without a mask. The same dissociation that in the ecclesiastical sphere shielded the abuser, in diplomacy abstains before medicide.
That is why the collapse is not technical. The foreign policy that Chile built against the crimes of the dictatorship is today being dismantled by the current heir to that same dictatorship. The government that abstains before torture descends from the project whose state terrorism unwittingly engendered the very precedent of universal jurisdiction against torture. This is not a deviation or a miscalculation: it is a restoration. The return of a view of the world in which certain lives — those of the victims — do not count as subjects.
And so we return to the cell. While we argue over voting technicalities, Hussam Abu Safiya is fading away in an Israeli prison, without charges, without trial, with no one to answer for him. In the last visit, his lawyer said he believed this would be the last time they would see each other. Chile could have placed its name on the side of those demanding his release, and preferred to step aside. The question at the beginning, then, was not rhetorical: are we going to sit around waiting for the news of his death? Because if a pediatrician who refused to abandon his patients dies tortured while the country of “never again” looks the other way, it will not only be Abu Safiya who fades out in that cell. It will also be what little remained of what we once said we would never allow to happen again. Neither here, nor there, nor to anyone.
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References
Amnesty International. (2026). Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Release paediatrician and hospital director immediately [Urgent action]. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/1242/2026/en/
BBC News Mundo. (2026, July 9). “I think this will be the last time we see each other”: Who is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, detained by Israel in Gaza, and why there is fear for his life. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/czxqz54l351o
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