The recent airing of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack on Britain’s Channel 4 was a wake-up call to many who’d been fence-sitting about the horrors that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people.
The film showed that for almost two years, doctors, nurses, paramedics, and surgeons have been bombed in hospitals, detained and tortured, disappeared, buried under rubble, and deliberately targeted in visibly marked ambulances.
Over 1,400 health care workers have been killed since the start of the genocide almost two years ago. And it’s still not over.
Currently, Gaza’s health care is beyond crisis point. Malnutrition is the highest ever recorded in the strip by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); there is sewage contamination because of the vast destruction of infrastructure; and restrictions on fuel are limiting the production of clean water. The appalling living conditions in overcrowded camps are also detrimentally impacting people’s health.
MSF teams in Gaza are witnessing rapid weight loss, prolonged infections, and visible fatigue among patients and their caregivers. All these effects have intensified under Israel’s sustained blockade of humanitarian aid and food.
Every day we think it can’t get any worse in the hellscape that Israel has created. Then it does.
As health care workers in the United Kingdom, we could not just sit and watch over twenty-one months of merciless killing aided and abetted by Western leaders, including the British government. Like many workers, we started to speak up, to protest, to show our opposition, and to organize against the ongoing targeting of fellow health care workers in Gaza. However, we were quickly confronted with attempts to silence and repress our efforts.
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Auteur: H. Akhrouf
