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Life Support: doctors in Gaza bear witness to genocide

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Life Support by Daniele Rugo

by Nasim Ahmed  Nasimbythedocks

Daniele Rugo’s documentary turns the testimony of British and international medics who worked in Gaza into a searing record of what is described in the film as Israel’s “genocidal frenzy”.

Hospitals represent life. The killing of people inside them, the doctors in Life Support say, is a line that should never have been crossed. Daniele Rugo’s 93-minute documentary opens with British doctors talking about Gaza, their connection to it, the resilience of the people there and a love of life that even decades of siege has not extinguished, before showing what happened when that line was crossed, again and again, over two years.

The film had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest on 13 June 2026, where it was nominated for the festival’s Tim Hetherington Award, followed by a Q&A with Rugo and contributors Dr Ana Jeelani and Prof Nick Maynard. A public premiere follows at Curzon Mayfair on 9 July. Most of what is on screen was shot by the doctors themselves, on their phones, in the middle of treating patients. MEMO was given an early preview of Life Support ahead of its public premiere at Curzon.

Rugo’s starting point, as he puts it, was simple: surgeons, physicians and nurses went to Gaza to support their Palestinian colleagues and ended up as “the sole international observers” of a genocide. Foreign media have been barred from entering Gaza throughout the war. The doctors who passed through Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine and similar routes were, for long stretches, among the only outsiders able to see what was happening inside the enclave.

The names will be familiar to anyone who has followed British medics’ accounts since October 2023: Dr Victoria Rose, the London-based reconstructive surgeon who has worked in Gaza since 2016 and has been on four missions since the war began; Prof Nick Maynard, the Oxford gastrointestinal surgeon who helped set up Gaza’s cancer services; and Dr Tanya Haj Hassan, the paediatric intensive care doctor and one of the few international witnesses to reach the north of the Strip. Dr James Smith, Dr Deborah Harrington, Dr Khaled Dawas and Dr Ana Jeelani also appear.

Their testimonies, painfully delivered, are as heart-wrenching as they are inspirational.  Rose recalls using her own initiative to take essential medical kit into Gaza in 23 suitcases. Jeelani describes operating without electricity or proper instruments, on wounded children who often needed repeated surgery. Maynard, who has worked in other war zones, says the scale of destruction in Gaza was on a different level.

Outside the hospitals hours of unseen footages filmed a dystopian landscape of buildings razed as far as the eye can see, alongside the daily life that somehow continues around it. This footage is vital because the film is not only about the wounded, the starving and the dead, but about the destruction of the institutions that make human life possible: hospitals, schools, religious buildings and the civic centres that sustain a people, a culture and a civilisation.

What the doctors describe is not only the bombing of buildings, but the destruction of the conditions that allow human existence to continue. This gives the film its wider charge: it is not only a record of war, but of what the doctors repeatedly understand as genocide.

“This is a war on civilians,” Haj Hassan says, describing wards filled with children and elderly women. The cases the doctors treat reflect Gaza’s population under siege: children, women, the elderly and the displaced. They speak of Palestinian medics operating after being told their own relatives had been killed, and of health workers fainting from hunger and exhaustion mid-shift. The footage from inside Al-Shifa hospital after Israel’s withdrawal, including the mass graves hospital staff were left to exhume themselves, is among the hardest material in the film to sit through.

The film also addresses one of the central justifications used by Israel for its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals: the claim that they were being used by Hamas. The doctors answer this directly. Despite hearing the allegation repeated by Israeli officials and echoed by Western governments, they say they saw no evidence to support it. For them, the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals cannot be explained away as a military necessity. It is part of a wider assault on everything that sustains life.

READ: Israeli Supreme Court rejects appeal against Palestinian doctor’s detention, lawyer says

That is where the film’s argument about genocide becomes unavoidable. Maynard says he did not use the word lightly and initially resisted it. But after what he witnessed in Gaza, he reached a different conclusion. The film follows that moral and intellectual shift carefully, showing how doctors who entered Gaza to provide medical care came out asking how such devastation had been allowed to continue.

The documentary then widens the lens, turning to genocide scholars to explain the role of dehumanisation. They describe it as a common feature of genocides, from Rwanda onwards: a process by which a people are stripped of their humanity before violence against them is normalised. In Gaza, the film suggests, that process has been visible not only in language, but in the targeting of the very environment needed for human life to continue. As one contributor puts it, Palestinians have been dehumanised “in a way that we’ve not seen anywhere else in modern times.”

The doctors do not leave Gaza as they entered it. They arrive to treat the wounded and support Palestinian colleagues, but what they see makes it impossible for them simply to return home and move on. “You cannot witness what is happening in Gaza and not emerge enraged and determined to stop it,” one doctor says. That sense of responsibility runs through the film: having seen what they have seen, the doctors know that silence is no longer possible.

The film also shows how Israel’s policy of starvation became another weapon deployed against Palestinians. We see what that meant for Gaza’s children, and for the parents and doctors trying desperately to keep them alive with almost nothing. The documentary links this suffering to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid distribution system turned the search for food into a life-and-death situation for Palestinians.

Yet Life Support is not only a film about suffering. It also shows how Palestinians continue to hold on to their humanity, dignity and will to live amid conditions designed to break them. The doctors help carry Gaza’s story to the outside world, but they are not the centre of it. At the centre are the Palestinian doctors, nurses and medical teams who keep treating patients with almost nothing, relying on courage, skill and sheer determination to keep people alive.

Rugo brings the same concern with memory and violence that shaped his previous film, The Soil and The Sea, which documented mass graves from Lebanon’s civil war. In Life Support, he works with editor Masahiro Hirakubo to hold together material that is often extremely painful to watch without losing sight of the people at the heart of the film: the doctors, the patients and the Palestinian medical workers trying to keep Gaza alive.

The film’s sound is equally important. Palestinian composer Habib Shehada Hanna is joined by Robert Del Naja and Euan Dickinson of Massive Attack, giving the documentary a soundtrack that deepens its emotional force. The film’s executive producers include Hollywood star Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, Farah Nabulsi and Asif Kapadia. Ken Loach has called the film “compulsory viewing.”

He is right. Life Support does not try to make its subject easier to watch, and it should not. What it leaves you with is a record of who kept Gaza’s hospitals running, what it cost them, and how much of it the world chose not to see.

READ: Gaza doctors were building a health system – then came the war

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza's hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
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Continue ReadingLife Support: doctors in Gaza bear witness to genocide

Israeli forces bulldoze land during incursion into Syria’s Quneitra countryside

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A view of Circassian village at the countryside of Quneitra, Syria on March 26, 2026. [Enver Asfur – Anadolu Agency]

An Israeli force entered the village of Al-Rafid in the countryside of Syria’s Quneitra province on Tuesday and conducted bulldozing operations west of the village, according to Syria’s state news agency, SANA, Anadolu reports.

SANA reported that an Israeli military bulldozer advanced toward the village in southern Quneitra before conducting land-clearing operations in areas west of Al-Rafid.

Syrian authorities did not immediately respond to the incident, and the motives for the operations are still unclear.

The incident comes amid continued Israeli violations of Syrian sovereignty, particularly in the south.

Israeli forces have carried out near-daily airstrikes and ground incursions in southern Syria, including setting up checkpoints, searching civilians, raiding homes and detaining residents, among them children and shepherds.

Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8, 2024, Israel declared the collapse of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement between the two sides and occupied the Syrian buffer zone, while Damascus said it remained committed to the agreement.

Despite the new Syrian administration not issuing threats toward Israel, Israeli forces have continued launching airstrikes across Syria since Assad’s removal, killing civilians and destroying military sites, vehicles and ammunition.

READ: Netanyahu says Israel expanding ground offensive in Lebanon despite ceasefire

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/

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Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.

Continue ReadingIsraeli forces bulldoze land during incursion into Syria’s Quneitra countryside

‘Children shot, stabbed and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank’, UNICEF says

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Israeli soldiers use tear gas to Palestinians protesting during the raid in Nablus city of West Bank, Palestine on May 3, 2026. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]

Israeli forces and armed Jewish settlers are carrying out increasingly coordinated attacks on Palestinian children across the occupied West Bank, with documented incidents including shootings, stabbings, beatings and the use of pepper spray, the UN’s children’s agency has said.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Tuesday, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said: “We’re seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated. Documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten and children pepper-sprayed.”

At least 70 Palestinian children have been killed in the occupied West Bank since January 2025 — an average of one a week — and a further 850 have been injured, the vast majority by live Israeli ammunition, according to UNICEF figures.

The agency said March 2026 had recorded the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the past 20 years. “All this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks,” Elder said.

Recalling a recent visit to the occupied territory, the UNICEF spokesperson described meeting an eight-year-old Palestinian boy who had been beaten with a piece of wood during a settler attack and hospitalised for head injuries. The boy’s mother, he said, “had both her arms broken when she reached across to protect her four-month-old baby, putting therefore her arms between her baby and the attacker’s club.”

READ: Palestinian children injured in Israeli raids, as illegal settlers step up attacks in West Bank

Elder also highlighted a sharp increase in attacks targeting Palestinian education, including the killing, injury and detention of students and the demolition of schools by Israeli forces. “Schools, which should be places of safety and stability, are increasingly becoming places of panic,” he said.

The spokesperson described accompanying Palestinian schoolchildren on their journey to class in an effort to help them avoid being attacked. “It’s interesting to watch them walk… They don’t walk in a straight line because they’re constantly looking over their shoulder,” he said. “This is a walk to school. It’s become a walk through fear.”

UNICEF also reported a “sharp rise” in the arrest and detention of Palestinian children by Israeli occupation forces. Some 347 Palestinian children are currently being held in Israeli military detention “for alleged security-related offences” — the highest figure in eight years, Elder said.

“Alarmingly, more than half of these children, 180, are held under administrative detention and without the procedural safeguards, including detention without regular access to legal counsel and the right to challenge detention,” Elder added.

Administrative detention is a system inherited from the British Mandate era that allows the Israeli military to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence.

Turning to the Gaza Strip, Elder said the UN had documented the killing of at least 229 Palestinian children and the injury of 260 more since the October 2025 ceasefire — agreed after nearly two years of Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged enclave.

Dr Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the World Health Organization’s representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told the same briefing that some 10,000 children in Gaza are now living with life-changing injuries.

An estimated 43,000 of the 172,000 Palestinians injured in Gaza since October 2023 have sustained such trauma — including injuries to limbs, the spinal cord or the brain — she said. Almost 2,500 people have been injured since the October 2025 ceasefire alone.

“Of the 2,277 people that have had a limb amputated, less than 25 per cent have been fitted with permanent prosthetics,” Van de Weerdt said, blaming a severe shortage of prosthetics inside the Strip.

READ: Illegal Israeli settlers attack Palestinians in 13 locations across occupied West Bank

Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/

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Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms, small Orca speaks bluntly.

Continue Reading‘Children shot, stabbed and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank’, UNICEF says

Israel detains 1,800 Palestinian children since Gaza war began

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Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian child, Hebron, West Bank

The Palestine Centre for Prisoners’ Studies has reported a sharp rise in the detention and abuse of Palestinian children since the outbreak of the war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, documenting more than 1,800 arrests of minors, including some as young as 10.

In a recent report, the centre said these arrests are not random but part of a systematic policy targeting Palestinian children, within a broader escalation of repression. It added that tens of thousands of children have been detained since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

The report noted a significant increase in violations since the start of the war, with harsher forms of abuse and torture against children. It highlighted serious practices such as starvation, which it said led to the death of 17-year-old detainee Walid Ahmad from the town of Silwad, inside Megiddo prison, after his health deteriorated due to lack of food and medical care.

According to the centre, arrests are often carried out in “violent and brutal” ways, including night raids on family homes, destruction of property, and the forcible detention of children. They are then transferred to interrogation centres, where they face beatings and humiliation, and are held in conditions lacking basic health standards.

READ: 2 children among 4 Palestinians killed in attacks by Israeli army, occupiers in West Bank

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/

Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don't need people to join wars after they've already won. He's challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingIsrael detains 1,800 Palestinian children since Gaza war began

Israeli forces fire teargas at schoolchildren holding West Bank sit-in

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/13/israeli-forces-fire-teargas-at-schoolchildren-holding-west-bank-sit-in

Palestinian students at an outdoor lesson after Israeli settlers blocked the road leading to their school in the village of Umm al-Khair. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Incident took place on first day back at school in small village, as settlers blocked pupils’ access

Israeli forces have fired teargas at Palestinian schoolchildren who were staging a sit-in in the occupied West Bank after settlers blocked access to their school.

The Israeli military said it had dispersed an “unusual gathering”, but did not specify whether its troops had fired teargas at the children on the first day of class since the start of the Iran war.

The incident took place at Umm al-Khair, a small village in the southern West Bank region of Masafer Yatta.

Schoolchildren there had been due back in class on Monday for the first time in more than 40 days, after lessons were suspended as a result of the Israeli-US attack on Iran on 28 February.

A group of schoolchildren and Palestinian residents had gathered near a barbed wire fence erected by Israeli settlers, which blocked access to the school.

Schoolchildren and some local adults were holding an open-air class as a sit-in to demand access when troops fired the teargas, witnesses said.

“We were sitting and they threw a grenade [teargas canister] at us. I got scared and started screaming and ran away,” said 12-year-old Sarah al-Hathaleen.

“I started crying. A woman hugged me and stayed with me. We were very scared.”

…

Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/13/israeli-forces-fire-teargas-at-schoolchildren-holding-west-bank-sit-in

Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Continue ReadingIsraeli forces fire teargas at schoolchildren holding West Bank sit-in