On Friday, according to the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “The Israel Defense Forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia on Friday, for the third time. According to the World Health Organization, the operation forced the last working hospital in the northern Gaza Strip to suspend operations. Fires broke out in the hospital's laboratory and surgery department, and five medical staff members, including a pediatrician, were killed by IDF fire.” [Link]
Some 350 medical staff and patients were forced to leave the hospital. And they were forced to undress, in the freezing cold. Among them was Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya. At this moment his fate is unknown. According to this morning’s Democracy Now!, his family believes Dr. Abu Safiya has been moved to Israel’s notorious prison in the Negev Desert, where many medical staff have previously be subjected to torture and death.
Since the Gaza war began, Israel has conducted 1,250 attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities. More than half of Gaza’s hospitals has been destroyed, as was Kamal Adwan hospital over the weekend. About 1,000 of Gaza’s health and medical workers have been killed by Israel’s (US-supplied) shells and bombs. As Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah described in the Democracy Now! interview linked below, medical people are being killed at a much higher rate than the general population – they are being targeted by Israel for death.
As Dr. Abu-Sittah explained this morning, while the official death toll in Gaza, compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health, is now at 45,000, the real number of deaths is closer to 300,000. This includes the tens of thousands of Gazans buried under the rubble, as well as the tens of thousands who have died, and continue to die, from untreated wounds, malnutrition, and now freezing to death. Gaza’s cultural institutions - mosques, schools, universities, etc. - have been destroyed. " This can be described as “cultural genocide,” eliminating not only most of the people and seizing their land, but also destroying the common culture and collective memory of those people who are being targeted.
The silence of the American Medical Association and similar organizations in Europe testifies to the moral depravity of our medical profession, who should be standing up for their colleagues in Gaza. Perhaps, if they were to raise their voices, they might change for the better the public non-discourse about the responsibilities of All countries – not just Israel – to stand up against genocide.
Please share this info & your outrage with friends, especially doctors and medical people who might be able to change some things.
HERE IS SOME USEFUL/INTERESTING READING & VIEWING ABOUT ALL THIS.
(Video) Israel detains Dr Hussam Abu Safia after raiding Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
From Aljazeera [December 29, 2024]
---- There have been calls for the immediate release of a hospital director who has been detained by the Israeli military in Gaza. Dr Hussam Abu Safia was arrested during a raid of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north of the strip. His whereabouts are unknown. Israel detained hundreds of people including medics and patients and says 240 are still in custody. Hundreds more have since been released. Some have been describing the violence and abuse they suffered at the hands of the Israeli army. Aljazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Palestine. [See the Program]
(Video) “A Genocidal Project”: Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah on Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Health System
From Democracy Now! [December 30, 2024]
---- Gaza’s Health Ministry has confirmed that close to 46,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s ongoing assault, but Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimates the true number is closer to 300,000. “This is literally and mathematically a genocidal project,” says Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza for over a month treating patients at both Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals. Israel continues to attack what remains of the besieged territory’s medical infrastructure. On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others. On Friday, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital, and set the facility on fire. Many staff and patients were reportedly forced to go outside and strip in winter weather. The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was arrested, and his whereabouts remain unknown. “It’s been obvious from the beginning that Israel has been wiping out a whole generation of health professionals in Gaza as a way of increasing the genocidal death toll but also of permanently making Gaza uninhabitable,” says Abu-Sittah. “On the 7th of October, the Israelis crossed that genocidal Rubicon that settler-colonial projects cross.” [See the Program]
The willful and dangerous silence of the U.S. medical establishment on Gaza
By Mansoor Malik, Ravi Chandra and Gary S. Belkin, Mondoweiss [December 15, 2024]
---- Despite the overwhelming human catastrophe and plausible genocide and medical war crimes in Gaza, major U.S. medical organizations, journals, and lobbies have failed to adopt a meaningful stance against these atrocities. Major medical organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the American Medical Association, and American Pediatric Associations have not called for a ceasefire or investigation of war crimes. This is in sharp contrast to their earlier reaction to the Ukraine war, the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and even the recent statements of the U.S. government. … American medical organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) were prompt in condemning Hamas attacks but have not adopted any position on the Israeli war crimes, genocide, destruction of all the major hospitals, and killing of healthcare workers in Gaza, even in the face of decisions by International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. AMA has rejected calls from its members to discuss a ceasefire resolution in the guise of maintaining neutrality, notwithstanding its forceful condemnation of the loss of civilian life in Ukraine and Israel. [Read More]
