Above photo: Health activists in the UK organize a mass picket line in front of the office of Palantir. PHM UK.
Health activists continue to rally in solidarity with health workers in Palestine, who are being killed, targeted, and threatened by Israeli Occupying Forces.
“There is a real danger that when world leaders return from their Christmas holidays, there will be no health system left in Gaza,” warned Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). During the last 75 days, Israeli attacks have decimated the health infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, leaving 2.2 million without access to essential care.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are no fully operational hospitals in this part of occupied Palestine left, and those still providing care are hanging by a very thin thread. MAP also reported that over the past 10 weeks of Israeli attacks, more health workers were killed than in any conflict since 2016. The official estimation of the number of health workers’ deaths puts the toll at over 300, and many more have been taken away by Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) during raids in hospitals and health centers.
In a recent briefing organized by No Cold War and the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian Legislative Council recounted only a shred of their experience based on testimonies given by a recently released first respondent. The health worker told Barghouti and his comrades that approximately 1,000 people were held in a concentration camp in the Negev desert, where they were subjected to torture and inhuman conditions.
The health worker described how they were taken to the camp on trucks, after having been forced to strip naked, and were then beaten and exposed to waterboarding and electrical shocks. The director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, was reportedly held in the same camp as the first-aid worker whose story Barghouti referred to and was said to be in very bad condition.
In addition to the health workers who have been arrested, the status of many more remains unknown, including Ahmed Muhanna, the director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalya.
The targeted detainment and kidnapping of health workers should be taken as a sign that Israel is preparing the ground for staged trials “aimed at maintaining the criminalization of the health system in Gaza,” according to Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who has been reporting on the situation in Gaza since the beginning of the October 7 attacks.
An indication that this might already be going on was an announcement published by Israel’s security services, saying that Ahmed Al-Kahlout, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, had confirmed the use of the hospital infrastructure by Hamas. Following the announcement, however, the Gaza Ministry of Health pointed out that the statement is extremely likely to have been extracted at gunpoint – either literally or through threats to Al-Kahlout’s life and family.
Considering the testimonies from the prisons and camps where the IOF keeps health workers and other prisoners, it is not difficult to imagine how this could have played out. Only days before, Hani Al-Haitham, the head of Al-Shifa Hospital’s emergency services, was killed in a targeted attack, along with his wife, physician Sameera Ghifari, and their five children.
“Over the past two months, he served fearlessly, among the last doctors out of Shifa as Israel besieged it. He miraculously escaped arrest as he left, which may be why he was assassinated with his family,” his friends wrote on social media.
While the attacks on health care in Gaza continue, the Global North remains complicit in Israel’s actions. The current war on Gaza is not simply an Israeli war, said Mustafa Barghouti, but is also a war in which the United States and the United Kingdom bear direct responsibility. In order to put an end to it, it is necessary to apply pressure on the governments of these countries as well.
This is something that Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) groups in Europe have been steadily working on over the past weeks. Reflecting on their actions, Fiona Ben Chekroun from the Palestinian BDS National Committee stressed that efforts in Europe and the rest of the Global North are now aiming primarily to expose the West’s complicity in the current war on Gaza and ensuring that Israel’s impunity does not last.
Following a similar line of action, health workers in the UK organized a mass picket line in front of the local headquarters of Palantir, a US-based company that specializes in data analytics and surveillance, on December 21. Palantir, which expressed its support for Israel on multiple occasions since the beginning of the latest round of attacks against Gaza, has been awarded a contract for data management by NHS England. The health workers demanded that the contract be annulled and that companies complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza are not awarded for their support to the occupation.
At this point, Barghouti said during the briefing, it is essential that the pressure on Israel and on complicit governments does not wind down. “Don’t let the pressure down,” he said. “Reactivate all the solidarity movements and keep them going, especially in countries like Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands.”