A delegation of American and British doctors is in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration the Israeli military is systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes.
The doctors, who have recently returned from volunteering at Gaza’s besieged hospitals, are expected to meet White House officials and senior members of Congress this week to warn that pledges of increased aid to Palestinians under bombardment are largely meaningless without an immediate ceasefire to allow safe distribution of food and the revival of healthcare services.
Professor Nick Maynard, the former director for cancer services at Oxford University who worked at the al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza at the beginning of the year, accused the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of “appalling atrocities”.
“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system,” he said.
“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”
The UN says none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is fully functional. A dozen are partially working and the others are destroyed. On Monday, the Israeli military again raided the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Medical staff said the IDF killed and arrested Palestinians inside the hospital.
The crisis in the hospitals has been compounded by the killing or arrest of hundreds of healthcare workers by the Israeli military. Last week the BBC reported that medical staff said they werestripped, beaten and tortured by Israeli troops during a raid on the Nasser hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip, where half the population is now displaced.
Maynard said he believed the closure and damage to the hospitals was part of a strategy to force Palestinians out of their homes.
“It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south,” he said.
The IDF said in a statement that “a central feature of Hamas’ strategy is the exploitation of civilian structures for terror purposes”.
“It has been well documented that Hamas uses hospitals and medical centres for its terror activities by building military networks within and beneath hospitals, launching attacks and storing weapons within the confines of hospitals, and using hospital infrastructure and staff for terror activities … If not stopped, under certain conditions, this illegal military use can make the hospital lose its protection from attack,” it said.
The doctors are expected to meet US national security council officials and senior members of Congress in the coming days, including Senator Chris Van Hollen who recently called on Biden to “use all levers” to pressure Israel to relieve the humanitarian crisis. They spoke to delegates to the UN from France, Ireland, South Africa and the UK in New York earlier this week.
Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago doctor who volunteered in Nasser hospital’s emergency room in January, said the damage to the healthcare system makes the need for a ceasefire all the more urgent.
“We all feel a sense of urgency,” said Ahmad. “So we’re trying to communicate that same sense of urgency to people who can make some impactful decisions.”
The Gaza health ministry estimates Israel has killed about 32,000 people, the majority women and children, in response to the 7 October Hamas attack in which about 1,200 Israelis and others were killed. But the doctors said that with most hospitals closed or overwhelmed, there are tens of thousands more Palestinians with severe wounds that are not being adequately treated beyond immediate emergency care and many of those will die or be left with disabilities.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now at risk of starvation, because Israel has blocked adequate food supplies to Gaza. The UN has warned that Israeli restrictions may amount to the war crime of deliberate starvation, and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has accused Israel of “provoking famine” and using starvation “as a weapon of war”.
Maynard said the delegation will warn the White House that large-scale food deliveries will have a limited impact without a ceasefire.
“We’re here to say that however much aid gets to the borders of Gaza it cannot be distributed whilst there’s ongoing military action,” he said.
Dr Zaher Sahloul, president of the medical charity MedGlobal who volunteered in Gaza earlier this year, said that some Democratic politicians appear more open to discussion about Israel’s actions in part because of the voter backlash against Biden’s support for the military assault. Sahloul was a guest of Senator Dick Durbin at the president’s State of the Union address earlier this month.
“I think, especially now with the administration shifting its position on Gaza and trying to be more sensitive to the public pressure, they are more open to it. People want to hear about Gaza nowadays at the highest level,” said Sahloul.
Maynard said he met the British foreign secretary and former prime minister, David Cameron, before coming to the US.
“Although David Cameron was receptive, we walked away from the meeting thinking this was a tick box exercise that has had no impact whatsoever on our government,” he said.
Maynard, who has volunteered in Gaza repeatedly over the past decade as chief clinician for Medical Aid for Palestinians, said he travelled to the US because he does not believe Americans are hearing the full story.
“I felt a real desperation to counter some of the false narratives coming out of Israel, but also out of a lot of the western media and governments. The particular thing, which so many people believe because it keeps being repeated, is that the Israelis are protecting civilians. What we witnessed refutes that completely,” he said.
“We’ve witnessed appalling atrocities in Gaza and we’re desperately keen that people know about it. I witnessed indiscriminate killing of vast numbers of innocent civilians. I spent two weeks operating all the time. I operated on far more women than I did men. This notion that they’re targeting Hamas militants – I saw the most appalling injuries in children. Awful burns, traumatic amputations in children.”
The doctors fear worse to come after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, this week again rejected an appeal from Biden to call off a ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, which is crammed with more than one million displaced Palestinians.
Ahmad said that an assault on the area “will be catastrophic”.
“It’ll be a bloodbath. You have a place that already didn’t have the infrastructure for the one million who are there. Now they’re talking about a ground invasion with people not being able to go anywhere else. Everywhere is devastated,” he said.
