Dear All,

ast week the Israeli military said it was conducting its own ‘examination’ of its attack on a Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontières) shelter in Gaza. The attack, which took place on February 20, killed two people and injured seven others (including an 18-month-old baby) and was reported in detail by Sky News. That the IDF has even deigned to respond with an ‘examination’ is largely due to evidence from the site provided by Sky’s Data and Forensics teams.

But does it even matter that one month later the Israeli military has said something –anything – about the blatant targeting of the MSF shelter? In the almost six months of the IDF assault on Gaza, hospitals and medical professionals have been targeted with alarming consistency. And, it seems, with complete impunity despite Israel clearly being in violation of the International Humanitarian Law.

What’s referred to as IHL is made up largely of the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols and even though the protection of medical personnel is dealt with in detail there are possible exceptions, exceptions which Israel seems to be using as a blanket cover for all its attacks i.e. that the hospitals are harbouring combatants or the medical staff are combatants. How babies in incubators (like the newborns and infants who were left to die at the Al-Shifa hospital after the Israeli attack in November) can be classified as combatants however, remains unclear.

As the ICRC says, “medics are safeguarded under the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that, personnel, including those involved in the administration of units, should be respected and protected during combat activity. This includes the transport or treatment of the wounded and sick.” The latter specification has also been consistently violated by Israel by its targeting of ambulances and killing of ambulance staff. The overriding principle though, is that the sick and wounded and those providing them with care should be protected and not considered combatants.

But the longer something goes on, the more public outrage becomes muted. The outrageous act becomes almost normalised as it is repeated again and again and as reports of it are moved down in the news headlines.

In the case of the attack on the MSF shelter, the IDF parroted their usual “we have information that terrorists are present in the building” justification but the MSF general director Meinie Nicolai told Sky News, “The shelter was used by humanitarian personnel and their family members, identified by an MSF flag and notified to the Israeli authorities. We refute any allegations of terror activity occurring in MSF-run structures. It is a civilian space and this shows that nowhere is safe.” She reiterated that the coordinates and location had been provided to the authorities. And then it was attacked: Sky News forensics indicate that this was a tank attack followed by cover firing.

A week ago Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis were under attack again and the situation continues the same: in Gaza (and the West Bank), nobody, nowhere, is safe – unless of course if one is an IDF soldier killing people gleefully as if playing some sort of twisted video game and then posting your score on social media.

In early January, the WHO reported that “hospitals and other vital medical infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked nearly 600 times since war erupted.” Obviously, this number has increased since January, especially in view of the recent and repeated targeting of the Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals.

Most doctors in Gaza hospitals chose to remain and look after their patients despite knowing how dangerous it was. A harrowing account of what some of them endured appeared in BBC News early in March. During an Israeli raid on the Nasser hospital, on February 15, several doctors were rounded up and forced to strip and be on their knees for an interrogation. They were slapped and beaten and then 49 doctors, still only wearing underwear, were taken away and detained by the Israeli military. Of these 49, five are still missing and have presumably been killed. Of the others who were released, three spoke to the BBC about their captivity: they were “beaten repeatedly with sticks, hoses, rifle butts and fists,” were forced to stand or lie on their stomach for hours and were set upon by muzzled attack dogs. One IDF soldier broke the hand of the 26-year-old Dr Abu Sabha; he was released with a cast on his hand on which the star of David had been drawn. The men were also subjected to mock executions.

Similar accounts surfaced in a CNN report from March 21 about how medical staff at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital were stripped and subjected to humiliating interrogations. One doctor told CNN, “many were arrested and were taken to an unknown place. Some were forced to leave the hospital and displaced to the south half naked; others were ordered to go back to the hospital.” It was during this raid that the Israeli forces also detained and roughed up a team of journalists. Al Jazeera said in a statement regarding this that their reporter Ismail Al-Ghoul and his team “were detained and severely beaten before being taken to an undisclosed location and interrogated.”

It is obvious that no part of the Geneva Convention or IHL is being observed by Israel in what it continues to describe as a “war.” More than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, whole families have been obliterated and survivors have been left homeless and traumatized, many of them physically maimed and emotionally traumatised. But along with the so-called war on Hamas, Israel has also declared war on medics, aid workers and journalists.

But where, then, is the outrage? The British medical journal The Lancet did say:

“Together the global community needs somehow to find more robust ways to enforce international humanitarian law and bring to justice those who direct attacks against health in conflict.” Certainly those are not strong enough words. Plus, they are from June 2023 and they referred to the conflict in Ukraine…

The reaction surely needs to be stronger than this. The international community of doctors and medical professionals must surely find a strategy to express their outrage at this war on medics.

Best wishes,

Umber Khairi