A Gaza doctor has been missing since November. His Canadian cousin is still looking for answers

The last time Ontario resident Salim Elewa heard from his cousin, a resident emergency physician in Gaza, was over the phone on Nov. 18, when the doctor said he was approaching an IDF checkpoint and would call back later.

Elewa has been trying to find his cousin, Dr. Saleh Eleiwa, ever since, by contacting the International Red Cross in Jerusalem and in Canada, trying lawyers in Israel, and even appealing to his local MP. 

"We have not heard a single thing about him, about his whereabouts or anything like that," said Elewa from his home in Burlington, Ont. "We don't even know if he's still alive."

Elewa described his cousin as "one of the brightest people you'll ever meet" and the valedictorian of his medical school program when he graduated in 2018.

Dr. Eleiwa was working in the emergency department at Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital when, on Nov. 18, the Israel Defence Forces ordered an evacuation of the hospital.

"On the news, we saw that they were evacuating Al-Shifa hospital so we called him and we asked him what is happening," Elewa said. "He told us that they had given them half [an] hour to evacuate the whole hospital."

The doctor's plan, Elewa said, was to go to south Gaza to be with his family, as his home in the north had been bombed. But, Elewa said, no one in the family heard from him after that last phone call as he approached an IDF checkpoint en route. 

Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room physician in London, Ont., who has worked and trained doctors in Gaza, has been one of Eleiwa's teachers and done several rotations with him. 

Loubani said he has talked to other emergency doctors at Al-Shifa who saw what happened to Eleiwa, and told Loubani that Eleiwa was arrested by the IDF at the checkpoint along with other healthcare workers, some of whom were later released.

"The word came out through that type of prisoner grapevine that he was under arrest and had been taken into Israel," Loubani said. "That's the last that we've heard of him." 

Elewa said he has heard the same from his cousin's colleagues.

In a statement to CBC News, a spokesperson for the IDF said the force "recognizes the importance of the special protections given to medical teams under international humanitarian law and takes action to prevent harm to them." 

"The IDF is not at war with civilians in Gaza, the IDF is at war with Hamas. Hamas has embedded itself in civilian infrastructure and operates across the entire Gaza Strip," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said they could answer CBC's questions about Eleiwa if they had his passport number or ID number.