by Robert Inlakesh, Health Impact News:
Excerpts:
While the United States government attempts to lecture the world about its supposed “rules based order,” it‘s aiding, arming and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza’s already collapsed healthcare system. In fact, Israel’s attacks, justified by Washington in some cases, have resulted in the territory being left without a single functional hospital.
It was only two months into the war in Gaza that no functional hospital was left standing in the north of the territory. One month later, there were only seven out of 12 hospitals in southern Gaza that remained partially functional.
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Today, there is not a single functioning hospital in the entirety of Gaza, with some medics still trying to use the facilities that haven’t been destroyed by bombardment for shelter in which to treat patients with limited supplies, often to no avail.
After only five months of the now nine-month-long war, over 1,013 Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities were recorded in the occupied Palestinian territories, breaking UN records.
Israel has killed more than 500 Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza since the beginning of the war. To put this in perspective, between 2011 and 2024, 949 medical professionals in total were said to have been killed during the Syrian war, with the worst year on record seeing the deaths of almost 200, according to Physicians for Human Rights.
That means healthcare workers are being killed in Gaza at a rate around nine times greater than the yearly average during the war in Syria. According to the UN, “more healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October than were reported killed in all conflicts globally in 2021 and 2022 combined.”
For those medical professionals who remain, Doctors Without Borders has reported a major mental health crisis, with some doctors being forced to choose between treating their own family members and other patients.
In one horrifying case, Palestinian doctor Hani Bseiso was forced to amputate the lower part of his teenage daughter’s leg on a kitchen table without anesthetic and using little more than a pair of scissors and gauze. She miraculously survived.
Another Palestinian doctor wasn’t as lucky, as he was forced to watch his son slowly die while amputating his leg without anesthetic.
Perhaps the most concerning fact, however, is that hospitals have openly been declared a primary target of the Israeli military’s ground offensive.
In November, Israel built a case to invade Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the besieged coastal enclave. The Israeli army released a CGI video depicting a multi-layered tunnel system under Al-Shifa medical complex, claiming that it was the primary headquarters for Hamas.
The US government then backed Israeli claims that the hospital was being used as a headquarters, as airstrikes repeatedly rained down upon civilians in the complex’s courtyard.
After Israel’s army had violently invaded the hospital, killing dozens of civilians in the process, an analysis published by the Washington Post found “no immediate evidence” that a tunnel complex had been used by Hamas under the hospital.
Despite the US-Israeli claims having been debunked, Washington did not even issue an apology, as Israel moved on to invade the city of Khan Younis the next month, claiming it was the “real Hamas headquarters.”
At the heart of the Israeli invasion of Khan Younis was the objective of taking over Gaza’s second-largest medical complex, Nasser Hospital.
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