How can Palestinian medics ‘co-operate’ with Israeli health bodies during a genocide?
A nurse cares for a premature baby in an incubator at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on 15 March 2025 after Israel cut electricity to Gaza
Carlyn Zwarenstein writes in Middle East Eye on 19 June 2025:
A recent editorial in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), one of the most prominent and widely cited public health journals in the United States, advocates for renewed cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian public health sectors.
This appeal, authored by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and other Israeli institutions, badly misrepresents the reality of Israel’s systematic destruction of every aspect of Palestinian public health and the complicity of its healthcare institutions in that very process.
What is happening in Gaza today is not simply a failure of cooperation. It is a one-sided assault on its infrastructure and practitioners in more than 600 days of violence and terror enacted by one of the world’s most powerful armies against a trapped civilian population.
Since October 2023, Gaza has been under near-total siege, as Israel has dropped over 100,000 tonnes of explosives, destroying local agriculture, bakeries, pharmaceutical stockpiles, solar panels and water desalination facilities – effectively making public health impossible.
As of March, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 670 attacks by Israeli forces on legally protected healthcare infrastructure and personnel. At least 1,400 healthcare workers have now been killed by Israel in its war on Gaza.
Despite more than 100,000 injuries documented by the WHO as resulting from Israeli attacks, only 7,057 medical evacuations were permitted – largely because Israel refused to grant the necessary visas.