Imagine Central Maine Medical Center is bombed while you’re working your shift. The hospital director is hit by shrapnel, but he vows to continue caring for patients. He’s one of the only doctors left, because most of them were arrested last month by an occupation army.

Imagine the generators have been hit, you are working in the dark, equipment destroyed, no water.

You sleep in the hospital, because your own home was bombed. You haven’t seen your own family for months.

The army surrounds your hospital. It orders you to leave. You will not leave your patients. Neither will your hospital director.

Just after Christmas, the army storms your hospital. You and your colleagues are forced to strip, beaten, women reported being sexually assaulted.

You are all arrested, hospital set on fire. The army writes numbers on your bodies, much like Nazis tattooed numbers on my family’s forearms.

During an 80-plus day siege at Kamal Adwan Hospital before that raid, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya pleaded with the world for help. In response, his son was murdered in front of him.

Credible sources say Dr. Abu Safiya is being held at Sde Teiman, Israel’s infamous torture center. After initially denying knowledge of his whereabouts or that he was arrested, Israel recently acknowledged it has detained the doctor as a “suspected” terrorist.

Hospital workers are not terrorists. There is no excuse for Israel’s crimes, funded by our tax dollars. The truth needs to be told now, not buried for decades as crimes against humanity so often are.

Jamila Levasseur, Waldo