Israel’s on-going heinous crimes against medical staff and hospitals in Gaza
The following speech was delivered by Jill Austin, of Aberdeen Healthcare Workers for Peace, at our Barclays protest of February 10th.
Hi, I’m Jill, one of the organisers of Aberdeen Healthcare Workers for Peace.
Our group formed in early November, when it became clear that this was neither a targeted retaliation against Hamas for the Oct 7th attack, nor even one of Israel’s periodic brutal “mowings of the lawn”. This was full scale collective punishment of the people of Gaza, and a key component of the IOF’s strategy was the deliberate targeting of Gaza’s healthcare facilities and personnel.
Attending the Saturday protests as concerned individuals was no longer enough.
We held our first candlelit vigil for the Healthcare Workers killed in Gaza on the 17th November, outside the gates of ARI. We read aloud the names of 223 people- nurses, doctors, paramedics, physios, OTs, Midwives, radiographers, pharmacists, students……
I never imagined then that we would still be gathering every Friday at ARI, much less that as of yesterday the list of martyred healthcare workers would have become so long we could no longer read it out loud.
Truth be told, I really struggled to work out what to say today.
The scale of Gaza’s healthcare crisis is so massive it almost defies description.
I’ve tried to write about this so many times over the past few months, but every time I picked up my phone to fact check the awful story I planned to tell, even more heinous crimes had been committed.
I was appalled to realise while writing this that there have been so many attacks on healthcare that the new horrors had pushed the old ones out of my head.
I had forgotten that during November’s truce the bodies of 5 premature babies were discovered in the NICU of al Nasr hospital. All patients and staff and had been forced to leave the hospital at gunpoint earlier that month and evacuate to the south of Gaza by foot. The International Red Cross were unable to evacuate the ventilated babies as the hospital was being bombed.
That incident alone should have been enough to force western governments to act, but no. Our politicians said Israel had a right to defend itself and refused to vote for a ceasefire. They gave the IOF carte blanche not just to restart their bombing, but to commence full scale genocide.
There are no words that even come close to describing the horrors being faced by our Palestinian colleagues.
The number of casualties and extent of injuries from a single airstrike would completely overwhelm a fully staffed, fully stocked hospital.
When you have 20 critically ill patients on the emergency room floor and another 30 expected any minute, there simply aren’t the resources to spend 5 hours fixing one person’s complex fractures. This is why 1000 more children in Gaza are now amputees.
Gaza’s healthcare workers have been dealing with this day after day after day, whilst starving, homeless and often multiply bereaved.
And they do this while under attack themselves.
Well over 400 healthcare workers have been killed now, and the attacks on healthcare are getting ever more brazen as the days go by. Gone are the days when healthcare workers could leave the hospital waving white flags as they did in Al Nasr.
There is now a well-established pattern: hospitals are besieged for weeks before being stormed and ransacked and the staff abducted. Over 60 are confirmed to be held in Israeli prisons, and the whereabouts of hundreds of other healthcare workers detained when troops entered their hospitals are unknown.
Yesterday news emerged of the fate of some of those detained healthcare workers when a doctor who had been released detailed the torture he and the others were subjected to, the worst of which was reserved for the director general of Al-Shifa hospital.
You remember- Gaza’s largest hospital, where the sickest and most complex patients were cared for. The hospital they destroyed because of the Hamas command centre bunker they never found.
Dr Mohamed Abu Salmiya was arrested 78 days ago when he refused to abandon the patients in the hospital he was responsible for. His captors broke both of his hands. Soldiers put a chain around his neck and dragged him around on all fours like an animal to humiliate him. When they wanted to feed him, the put a plate on the floor and made him eat it like a dog, in front of everyone. He remains in prison.
Yesterday, 8 staff were arrested by the IOF from the Palestine Red Crescent’s Al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, after a 10-hour raid where staff and patients were beaten and interrogated, and vital communication equipment destroyed. The hospital had been besieged for 19 days during which time a patient died when oxygen supplies ran out and staff were donating their own blood to save their patients.
The PRCS has been mercilessly targeted throughout. Ambulances in Gaza and the West Bank are routinely prevented from reaching patients by the IOF. 8 paramedics have been abducted from their ambulances while transferring critically ill patients to hospital, and on Thursday, two were injured and one killed by the IOF. Mohammed Al-Omari’s death took the total to 12 paramedics killed while on duty.
But when I woke up this morning and picked up my phone, that total had risen to 14.
12 days ago paramedics Youssef Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoon set off to rescue 6 year old Hind, who was trapped in a car with the bodies of 5 relatives who had been killed when Israeli tanks opened fire on them. The whole world heard her desperate pleas for help on the 911 call. This morning, Hind’s body was found alongside her relatives. And the two paramedics had been blown up, in their ambulance, when they pulled up beside the car.
What is most horrific is that this was an intentional act- the mission to rescue Hind had been co-ordinated with the IOF.
Most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are now completely non-functional either due to direct damage to buildings or lack of water and electricity- often by deliberate destruction of their water tanks, solar panels or generators. The handful left have very limited capacity and are also now under bombardment. One of those was Al Amal.
The other is Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
When I started writing this speech 2 days ago, a nurse had just been shot in the chest by a sniper drone while working in the operating theatre at Nasser Hospital. He narrowly escaped death due to the prompt treatment delivered by the only other theatre team in the hospital. There are only 2 consultant surgeons and a handful of registrars taking care of all the surgical patients in Nasser hospital.
That was going to be my story, but I woke up this morning and opened my phone to the news from one of those surgeons that tanks have entered the Nasser Medical Complex and many have been killed and injured inside the hospital.
The only remaining fully functional hospitals in Gaza at present are the 3 field hospitals erected over the past 2 months, but even they have been targeted by Israeli strikes. They are all in the south, which Israel has just announced it plans to invade.
The next time I open my phone will it be to find there are no hospitals left in Gaza?
Will there even be anyone left to treat?
I fear that by the time our governments and institutions act, there will be no-one left to save.
No words can describe the depths of my disgust at the politicians who allow this genocide to continue and the billionaires who profit from it.
What is most appalling is that this could be all stopped in a matter of days if our politicians acted. They were quick enough to defund UNRWA and send the navy to protect profits. They have the power to stop this, yet they choose not to.
The time for words is long past. Asking Israel to protect civilians and abide by international law is like pissing in the wind.
Anyone continuing to fund the Israeli war machine, like Barclays Bank that we were protesting outside today, has blood on their hands.
To have any chance of regaining even a shred of respect, our institutions need to commence total academic and cultural boycott, and divest from all companies profiting from the Israeli apartheid regime. Now.
And our governments? They need to impose crippling sanctions and stop arming Israel!
Ceasefire NOW!