How much longer are the world’s leaders going to stand by and watch children being shredded to bits, doctors and nurses killed, arrested, detained and tortured, hospitals destroyed and schools bombed, the environment destroyed, humanitarian aid denied and a genocide committed in Gaza?
Do we have to remind our leaders again and again that this is real, not some dark dystopian event “over there?” This is Israel violating every United Nations humanitarian rule and rule of war in an ongoing apocalyptic genocide and telling the world that they can do as they like, no rules apply here.
A Commission of the UN’s Human Right’s Council in a report release on October 10th has found that Israel has implemented a deliberate policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system through its relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities, and that in doing so it is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. It found that “children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system.”
As yet more hospitals are attacked and destroyed, more health workers killed in what the UN special rapporteur on health Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng has this week called “medicide”, a new term to describe the widespread and systematic attacks by Israel on healthcare workers and facilities. “All of us continue to bear witness to the very practice of medicine being under attack,” she said. Emphasising that the right to health has become “untenable” amid relentless violence by Israel, she said that health workers are “exhausted, harassed, killed, [and] impeded from fulfilling their tasks as first responders.”
Dr Mofokeng’s comments come in the midst of a vicious, nearly three week long harrowing siege and yet more violent attacks on northern Gaza hospitals bringing the heath care system to the point of imminent collapse and killing more than 820 people most of these women and children. On Friday the IDF attacked, for the 14th time, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the few remaining hospitals in northern Gaza, inflicting severe damage to the hospital’s ICU, completely destroying its pharmacy and completely destroyed tents housing the displaced. Some 600 people, including 200 patients along with their relatives and hospital staff, were sheltering in the hospital at the time. During the assault the IDF detained 44 of the hospital’s 70-member team including the hospital’s director Dr Hussam Abu Safia. They were all humiliated, forced to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and ordered to sit in the sand and later taken away for interrogation. In another incident at the Al-Awda Hospital nearby, Dr Mohamed Obeid, head of the orthopedics department was also detained and his current location remains unknown.
Dr Obeid is among the numerous doctors who have been abducted, tortured and abused by the IDF as part of a ferocious attack on medical staff. We know that two doctors have also been killed under torture. Dr Adnan al-Bursh’s was killed in April while in Israeli custody, as reported by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. Dr al-Bursh was head of orthopedic medicine at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and a Professor of orthopedic medicine. He was arrested in December last year from the al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza after refusing to leave patients who had been under heavy Israeli bombardment. Dr Iyad Rantisi, who was the director of Kamal Adwan hospital’s maternity department, also died from torture after being detained in November last year. Over this last year we know that Dr Muhammad al-Ran, Dr Khaled Siam, Dr Saeed Marouf and Dr Khaled Hamouda, among others, have also been arrested and tortured but have been released. Many of these doctors had been held at the notorious Sde Teiman military base detention centre in Israel where evidence of brutal torture including sexual abuse and rape have been reported.
This recent attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital is just one of many attacks that the IDF has committed against Gaza’s hospitals, especially more recently in the camps and villages of northern Gaza in Jabalia, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Saftawi. The Indonesian hospital, in the north Beit Lahiya, was also attacked a week ago and put out of service after the IDF shelled the upper floors of the hospital, despite the presence of over 40 patients and medical staff. The IDF stormed an adjacent school and then set fire resulting in the destruction of the hospital generators. The solar panels on the rooftop were also damaged, leaving the Indonesian Hospital without any source of power, including for lifelines such as incubators. The United Nations has been unable to reach northern Gaza with desperately needed water, food and medical supplies for Kamal Adwan, Indonesian and al-Awda hospital’s despite demanding access to allow aid in. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have faced severe food, water and medical shortage and extreme and brutal bombing following the siege imposed by the IDF over three weeks ago. And we know, on October 18th alone 20,000 people were forcibly removed and hundreds of thousands have left in fear of their lives in this ongoing ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza. Truck loads of men were also abducted and taken to unknown locations.
These attacks on the hospitals and health staff follow the same patterns we have seen in others areas of IDF operations in the south of Gaza. The names of Al Shifa, Al Quds and al Nasser hospitals are etched in our memories as places of both extraordinary courage and extreme and unimaginable suffering. Hospitals are sacred places, but in Gaza they are places of terror, of torture and abuse and worse by the IDF. They are meant to be places of treatment, of healing and of dignified dying. The IDF regularly violates these sacred places, bombing around them, bombing inside them, destroying them, killing patients including children, stopping food and water, fuel, oxygen and medical supplies necessary for treatment and to save lives. These hospitals, instead of being places of sanctuary, are the killing fields of Gaza, they are an extreme example of medicide.
In gross violation of the articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention, written specifically after WWII to protect civilians and health care workers, the IDF have killed just over 1,000 Palestinian health workers since October 7th last year. This includes doctors, nurses, pharmacists, support workers, ambulance drivers and first attenders. As of September 25th this year the WHO reported that there have been 516 attacks on health facilities, 32 out of 36 hospitals have been damaged, 115 ambulances have been affected and in total 110 health facilities damaged.
In what is yet another blow to Gaza’s health system, the Israelis have banned all foreign doctors from entering Gaza, no doubt because many of them have been witness to the genocide, to the deliberate targeting of children, many in the head, and other multiple war crimes committed in Gaza against civilians. The WHO says that this is the first time that Israel has banned foreign medical specialists from entering Gaza. This ban has impacted over 50 medical specialists who were due to travel to Gaza. The care provided by these medial support teams is irreplaceable as they are able to deal with complex medical and especially surgical trauma that is common. Some 30 percent of services have been affected by this denial. Many patients suffer form extreme blast injuries that require specialists surgical intervention. So if this service is not provided immediately patients will die a painful death due to infections from these injuries.
“This genocide has shown the incredible work that doctors, healthcare, and other care workers do in defending human rights; they are the oath takers, the ones who refused to leave and stayed caring for their patients, knowing their own fates.” Dr Mofokeng, who is South African, called on world leaders “to summon the economic, political, diplomatic power that they have to make sure that this genocide ends.”
The people of Gaza are enduring apocalyptic humanitarian conditions, destruction, mass killing, wounding, being burnt alive in their tents and irreparable trauma on a scale that is unimaginable and brutal while the world watches on in silence. When will western nations, the USA, UK, Germany et al, stop this vicious, barbaric Israeli killing machine and stop the genocide in Gaza? And when will Australia and its leaders summon the moral courage needed to sanction Israel, to stop their needed weapons spare parts production and to implement the ICJ rulings, instead of cowering in the southern seas pretending it’s not our problem?
Helen McCue
Dr Helen McCue AM is a former United Nations consultant, working in the Middle East with refugees and displaced. Dr McCue has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights including the rights of Palestinian refugees for over 40 years. She is co-founder of Union Aid Abroad APHEDA and co-founder of Rural Australia for Refugees (RAR). Dr McCue is the 2024 recipient of the Jerusalem Peace Prize.