A war on hospitals is a war on civilians: Israel’s fatal blow to health in Gaza
Palestinians mourn the death of people killed in an Israeli airstrike outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 21 September 2024
Liat Kozma and Lee Mordechai write in +972 on 1 November 2024:
Whenever the Israeli public is called upon to discuss the fate of the Gaza Strip, the debate tends to focus on the question of who will control the territory after the war. In recent weeks, this debate, too, seems to have been sidelined by the escalating war on Lebanon and the Iranian threat.
Gaza’s fate, however, is not limited to questions of sovereignty or control, but to the very existence of life. Indeed, two recent publications that focused on Gaza’s health system sharply illustrate how much the current catastrophe challenges the very possibility of sustaining life in the territory.
At the end of September, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza issued a document that, for the first time, comprehensively details the damage to hospitals in the Strip over a year of war. The novelty of the report is not in the new information it brings, but rather in the aggregation of over 100 incidents that were reported in real time in the international and Arab media, as well as in periodic reports by international humanitarian organizations, into one document. It thus pieces together the gradual disintegration of Gaza’s health system, the direct and indirect causes of which are the responsibility of Israel and its army.
Meanwhile, on Oct. 2, 99 American medical professionals who volunteered in Gaza during the war for a cumulative 254 weeks issued a public letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, presenting a stark picture of the health of the civilian population in the Strip. These professionals — some with extensive experience providing medical relief in war zones and after natural disasters — said that the situation in Gaza was much worse than anything they had encountered before, including in Afghanistan or Ukraine.
A few days after the letter’s publication, we spoke separately with three of the signatories to get more detailed, first-hand accounts of the state of Gaza’s health system. Their insights are shared here alongside those of the documents above.
Easing suffering before death
The picture that emerges from the two documents and our conversations with doctors shows the fatal blow dealt to Gaza’s entire health system and infrastructure.
Only a few echoes of this disintegration reach the Israeli media; in fact, the absence of these reports from the Israeli public discourse creates the impression inside Israel that the early warnings of famine and epidemics in Gaza have not materialized. Moreover, the only number that is discussed is that of fatalities of Israeli attacks (over 43,061 Palestinians as of writing) — a number that excludes deaths from disease, starvation, and the poor health of the population after a year of war.
An examination of the data and testimonies, however, reveals the scope of the harm to the general Palestinian population, and particularly the lives of the most vulnerable — infants and toddlers, pregnant women, the elderly, and the chronically ill.
For example, the medical professionals who signed the letter to Biden and Harris estimate that it is likely that the death toll in Gaza since the beginning of the war exceeds 118,908. The letter explicitly states that, with marginal exceptions, the entire population of Gaza is sick and/or injured, and almost all children under the age of 5 whom the doctors encountered suffered from coughing and diarrhea.
In a survey conducted by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American surgeon who returned from Gaza, in conjunction with The New York Times, 63 of 65 American health care workers who volunteered in Gaza described severe malnutrition among patients, Palestinian health workers, and the general population. In addition, 52 medical professionals described near-universal mental distress among young children, noting that they had seen some who were suicidal or hoping to die. One of the nurses said that the children did not respond to pain, even while they were being stitched up after being wounded.