What’s happening in Gaza is the absolute defeat for the Hippocratic Oath
Don’t Israeli medical professionals have at least some sense of solidarity with doctors, nurses and paramedics like them? The chilling indifference of the Israeli public in the face of the atrocities taking place in Gaza in its name is also your responsibility. The medical associations and the medical staff must make a strong statement: Immediately stop the brutal attacks on hospitals.
By Noa Limone • Translated by Sol Salbe
On our way to annihilate Hamas, we are annihilating what’s left of our humanity. The reverberating silence of Israeli medical organisations in the face of the systematic destruction of hospitals in Gaza adds another nail in this coffin. An absolute defeat for the Hippocratic oath.
Last weekend, the IDF raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip for the third time. Among the dozens killed in the bombardment (according to a report by the Ministry of Health in Gaza) were five medical staff members, including a paediatrician and a laboratory technician. The remains of the institution — the ones that were not burnt down — remain empty. A few critically ill patients were transferred with their caregivers to the Indonesian Hospital, which had been raided by the military only three days earlier. The place lacks electricity, water and other basic conditions necessary to provide proper care.
Dozens of medical staff members were taken for questioning, including the hospital’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safia. In one of the previous bombings of the hospital, he lost his 15-year-old son. Later he too was injured. Despite this, he refused to abandon his patients and remained in the hospital, broadcasting distress calls about patients arriving with signs of starvation, a shortage of medicine and food, about amputations that could have been avoided had there been any neurosurgeons and vascular surgeons left in the northern Gaza Strip, and about complicated surgeries that had to be performed by doctors who were not trained to do so. He told of wounded people that rescuers had been unable to evacuate and were left to die in the streets, or under the rubble. Now no one knows his condition or where he is being held.
The World Health Organisation said it was shocked by the raid, which led to the closure and partial destruction of the last hospital still functioning in the area. “Israel,” according to the organisation’s statement, “is systematically dismantling Gaza’s health system.”
Yesterday it was reported that the IDF was raiding two more hospitals in Gaza. During the war, at least ten hospitals in the Gaza Strip had been besieged. Some of them were raided, many of them were damaged in the bombardments. Cannon shells hit dialysis units, and gunshots pierced oxygen tanks. Children in intensive care died when the generators stopped working.
So far, we haven’t been given sufficient proof for the IDF’s standard contention that the hospitals serve as Hamas headquarters. The most recent photos from the Kamal Adwan Hospital show a rather meagre collection of weapons, not much more than what one would find in an Israeli hospital today — just watch an average episode of Baby Boom — the Israeli version of There’s one Born Every Minute and count the guns in the maternity ward.
Do the paediatricians in Israel, who dedicate their lives with great devotion saving the lives and caring for the little helpless one, have no compassion left for newborn babies who die of hypothermia or starvation in the displaced Gazans’ tents? Aren’t the thousands of dead and amputated children keeping them awake at night? Don’t obstetricians and gynecologists care about women who undergo a caesarean section without anaesthetics? Or those who are forced by contractions to go to the hospital, but are shot and bleed to death on the way? Don’t Israeli medical professionals have at least some sense of solidarity with doctors, nurses and paramedics like them?
Your call for action will no longer be of any use for the tens of thousands of babies and children and mothers; for the wounded, the elderly and the disabled; for women and men of the medical staff who have been killed and injured. Still, it is required, it is the order of the day, and you are supposed to be our conscience. The chilling indifference of the Israeli public in the face of the atrocities taking place in Gaza in its name is also your responsibility. The medical associations and the medical staff must make a strong statement: Immediately stop the brutal attacks on hospitals.
