Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk speaks during a press conference in Cairo, Egypt on November 8, 2023. (Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images)
“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” said Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.
The United Nations’ human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperiling the enclave’s barely functioning healthcare system.
Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that he was “horrified” by the discovery of mass graves at the Nasser and al-Shifa medical complexes, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reduced to ruins.
More than 300 bodies were reportedly discovered in the mass grave near the Nasser facility in Khan Younis, Gaza, and eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers executed civilians during their two-week-long raid of al-Shifa last month.
Türk demanded an “independent, effective, and transparent” probe into the killings and mass graves, adding that “given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators.”
“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” he added. “And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees, and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.”
“Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price.”
The IDF’s destructive attacks on Nasser and al-Shifa were part of a broader Israeli assault on Gaza’s healthcare system. An analysis released Monday by Save the Children found that the rate of monthly Israeli attacks on healthcare in Gaza since October has exceeded that of any other conflict around the world since 2018.
The group estimated that Israel has launched an average of 73 attacks per month on healthcare in Gaza—and at least 435 attacks total since October.
“After six months of unimaginable horror, the healthcare system in Gaza has been brought to its knees,” said Xavier Joubert, Save the Children’s country director in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Healthcare workers are risking their lives daily to give Palestinian children a chance at survival. The constant attacks on healthcare are simply unjustifiable and must stop. Palestinian children must have unimpeded access to services, including healthcare and education.”
Türk also used his statement Tuesday to condemn Israeli forces’ killing of women and children in airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in recent days. The human rights official noted that Gaza doctors rescued a baby from the womb of her mother as the latter succumbed to head injuries from an Israeli strike.
“The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed—this is beyond warfare,” said Türk. “Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war.”
Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Palestinians walk among the damaged buildings near the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on April 1, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This is part of the genocidal machine,” said one surgeon who volunteered at the hospital. “The genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.”
The Israeli military withdrew from Gaza’s largest medical facility on Monday after a deadly two-week assault that left the only partially functioning hospital complex in famine-stricken northern Gaza in total ruins.
Israel’s military, which a United Nations expert has accused of waging an “unrelenting war” on Gaza’s healthcare system, claimed in a statement that it killed 200 “terrorists” inside and around the facility and arrested more than 500 people “associated with terrorist organizations” during its prolonged raid on al-Shifa.
The military did not provide evidence that those killed were militants; Israel has repeatedly been accused of labeling unarmed civilians “terrorists.”
According to eyewitness accounts of the raid, Israeli soldiers abused and executed civilians inside the al-Shifa complex, including more than a dozen children. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said last week that its field team “received identical testimonies about the killings and executions of Palestinian children between the ages of four and 16” in and around the hospital.
Photographs taken in the aftermath of Israel’s assault show al-Shifa buildings scorched, riddled with bullet holes, and reduced to rubble. The hospital’s emergency, surgical, and obstetrics wards were reportedly devastated by Israeli forces, and an unknown number of bodies are believed to be trapped under building ruins.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Sunday that Israel’s siege of the hospital killed at least 21 patients and left dozens of critically ill or wounded Gazans without “necessary means of care—no diapers, urine bags, water to clean wounds.”
Al-Shifa hospital in #Gaza this morning, following the end of the latest Israeli siege.
I repeat: hospitals must be respected and protected; they must not be used as battlefields. pic.twitter.com/gcABzSxrqx
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 1, 2024
Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, said he witnessed “hundreds of bodies” outside of the hospital when he visited the compound on Monday.
“The bodies were in horrific conditions; many had their hands and legs tied behind their backs and were flattened by a bulldozer,” Shabat wrote on social media. “Many of the bodies were burned and left to be crushed to pieces. Several bodies were decomposed and partly eaten by stray dogs. Most of the bodies were unrecognizable; families could only identify them by their clothes.”
“Al-Shifa Hospital was considered the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, catering to many complex cases,” Shabat added. “It has been completely destroyed; they burned it down and destroyed all medical equipment. Israeli occupation forces [have] one goal and it’s to destroy every inch of Gaza.”
Al Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital, a place of hope and healing. Turned to a burned out husk by Israel's marauding army.
There must be accountability for this crime. A shame on every politician who has failed to oppose this. pic.twitter.com/9caozTiCZH
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a surgeon who volunteered at al-Shifa, told Democracy Now! in an interview on Monday that prior to Israel’s assault on the hospital, al-Shifa “was 30% of the capacity of the health system in Gaza.” Israel raided the facility for the first time in November, and its latest attack began on March 18.
“The destruction of Shifa, the wanton destruction of Shifa, is a critical component of Israel’s plan to genocidally make sure that Gaza becomes an uninhabitable place, even after a cease-fire happens,” said Abu Sitta. “By destroying Shifa and making sure it is irreparable, the Israelis are trying to make sure that for years to come, Gaza does not have a functioning health system.”
Abu Sitta went on to criticize Western journalists for helping Israel perpetuate the narrative that al-Shifa was used by Hamas as a “command center” and thus an “acceptable” target.
“This is part of the genocidal machine,” said Abu Sitta. “The genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.”
Israeli troops have left Al-Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital, after a brutal two-week raid that left much of the complex in ruins and killed many civilians and medical staff there. “This is part of the genocidal machine," says Dr. @GhassanAbuSitt1, who has volunteered at Al-Shifa. pic.twitter.com/hwY6Gv4po1
Reuters described al-Shifa in the aftermath of the Israeli military’s two-week raid as a “wasteland of destroyed buildings” with “Palestinian bodies scattered in the dirt.”
Ismail al-Thawabta, director of Gaza’s media office, said in a statement Monday that Israeli forces “destroyed and burnt all buildings inside al-Shifa medical complex.”
“They bulldozed the courtyards, burying dozens of bodies of martyrs in the rubble, turning the place into a mass graveyard,” said al-Thawabta. “This is a crime against humanity.”
Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Nasser Hospital to receive medical treatment following Israeli attacks in Khan Younis, Gaza, on January 22, 2024. (Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images)
If we can’t find the morality to stop, we may find we have created a world in which no one can count on upholding basic human rights.
Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book.
Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion, or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of War of the Worlds or some other sci-fi fantasy.
Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed, and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone-launched laser-guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, healthcare workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.
At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on Earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.
Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as 12 additional surgeries. Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives.
He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed healthcare workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza, so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”
According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped 40 to 45 doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three healthcare professional organizations have issued a statement expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”
Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”
The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate New York who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming, “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”
In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors, and then he stopped. “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”
Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.
From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”
At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on Earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch. Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7, cannot—even if believed—justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.
The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisers make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality, and human dignity.
What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.
If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.
A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.
Injured Palestinians are brought to Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza on January 22, 2024. (Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The WHO “was not permitted to enter” the facility in recent days, said the agency chief, warning that “the cost of delays will be paid by patients’ lives.”
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Sunday that the largest hospital in the southern Gaza Strip “is not functional anymore, after a weeklong siege followed by the ongoing raid” by Israeli forces.
After claiming that Hamas was using Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis for “military activity” and some hostages’ bodies may be there, the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday began raiding the facility, where around 10,000 people had sought shelter. Sources there said the IDF bombed “a ward full of patients” and multiple people who were dependent on oxygen have died due to power outages.
Tedros highlighted on Sunday that the WHO team “was not permitted to enter” the facility in recent days “to assess the conditions of the patients and critical medical needs, despite reaching the hospital compound to deliver fuel alongside partners.”
“There are still about 200 patients in the hospital. At least 20 need to be urgently referred to other hospitals to receive healthcare; medical referral is every patient’s right,” he added. “The cost of delays will be paid by patients’ lives. Access to the patients and hospital should be facilitated.”
What conceivable purpose could Israeli forces have to prevent the @WHO from delivering medical aid to Nasser Hospital? To collectively punish the patients and doctors? To cover up when Israeli forces have done to the hospital? https://t.co/dlO1phoIif
Later Sunday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said that “150 patients who cannot move are piled inside the rooms and corridors of the old building at Nasser Medical Complex without medical care after the arrest of 70 of the complex’s management and medical staff.”
“The occupation refuses to evacuate patients for treatment in other hospitals, which endangers their lives, including seven intensive care patients, five dialysis patients, [and] three newborns in the nursery, in addition to cases of burns, amputations, quadriplegia, childbirth, and others,” the ministry added.
The IDF said on Telegram that in its operations around the facility, Israeli troops apprehended “hundreds of terrorists and other terror suspects who were hiding in the hospital, some of whom had posed as medical staff,” including alleged participants in the October 7 Hamas-led attack that led to the war.
Noting IDF claims that soldiers aimed to recover the remains of hostages believed to be in the facility, The Washington Postreported that “Israeli forces have not yet found the bodies of any hostages but said on Sunday that they discovered medicine at the hospital bearing the names of Israelis who were abducted by Hamas.”
Israeli forces taking a hostage to cover up what they have done in Gaza's Nasser Hospital. https://t.co/j1PzCuXenl
The Israeli assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed nearly 29,000 Palestinians, injured over 68,800 others, devastated civilian infrastructure—including hospitals—and left most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents displaced, hungry, and at risk of disease. Global experts and critics have accused Israel of genocide, including in a South Africa-led case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In response to IDF orders to leave northern Gaza, most residents are now crammed into the southern part of the strip. According toAl-Jazeera:
Al-Amal Hospital, the only other major medical facility still operational in Khan Younis, continues to be a target of Israeli attacks. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) on Sunday said Israeli forces targeted the third floor of the hospital with artillery fire.
The Israeli military has expanded its siege on Khan Younis and its medical facilities as it pushed further south into Rafah on the border with Egypt.
Throughout the week, people around the world including humanitarian and United Nations leaders have pressured Israel to refrain from a full-scale attack on Rafah. The ICJ on Friday echoed U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ warning that it “would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences.”
Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Nasser Hospital to receive medical treatment following Israeli attacks in Khan Younis, Gaza on January 22, 2024. (Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The situation is escalating every hour and every minute,” said a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Israeli forces on Thursday stormed the largest hospital in southern Gaza, ignoring warnings from United Nations officials, humanitarian groups, and the facility’s administrators that such a raid would put the lives of patients and people sheltering there at dire risk.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly destroyed the southern wall of the Nasser Hospital complex in Khan Younis and started raiding the facility, where around 10,000 people had sought shelter from Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks.
Without providing evidence, Israel has claimed Hamas is using the hospital for “military activities.” Israel also claimed to have intelligence indicating that hostages or their bodies were being held at Nasser.
Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, said Thursday that Israel launched a “massive incursion” into the hospital, firing on and wounding people inside and ordering the facility’s staff to move all patients who were unable to flee into a building that’s not adequately equipped, The Associated Press reported.
As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 1,500 displaced people and patients were still inside the Nasser complex, Gaza health officials said in an update on social media.
“Many cannot evacuate, such as those with lower limb amputations, severe burns, or the elderly,” al-Qudra told Al Jazeera.
Others worried that Israeli forces would shoot them if they tried to leave.
“I’m terrified to leave the hospital and get shot,” Hanin Abu Tiba, a 27-year-old English teacher sheltering at the hospital, toldThe New York Times on Wednesday.
The raid began Thursday after Israeli forces reportedly bombed a ward of the hospital that was full of patients. Gaza health officials said the IDF targeted the hospital’s orthopedic department, killing at least one person and injuring “many” more.
Israeli forces bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on Thursday. According to sources on the ground, Israel has struck a ward full of patients, resulting in casualties. pic.twitter.com/zTf5HujPAq
The Israeli military, which has encircled Nasser Hospital for weeks, began ordering civilians inside the facility to evacuate on Tuesday.
Citing one of the only remaining journalists inside the facility, The Intercept reported Wednesday that the IDF sent a handcuffed Palestinian man into Nasser to tell people sheltering inside to leave.
An Israeli soldier shot the man, later identified as Jamal Abu Al-Ola, three times in the chest and abdomen as he began walking out of the hospital after delivering the message.
Israeli snipers have also opened fire on people scrambling to flee the hospital as well as medical personnel and patients inside the facility.
Gaza health officials said Wednesday that the situation at Nasser is “catastrophic” and that Israel’s evacuation orders sparked “a state of panic among its residents.”
Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi, a surgeon at Nasser, posted video footage to Instagram that provides a glimpse of the chaos inside the hospital as it comes under Israeli attack.
Dr. Khaled Alserr, another Nasser surgeon, told AP that seven people injured by Israeli attacks on Thursday were already being treated for existing wounds. Alserr said a doctor was also injured when an Israeli drone “opened fire on the upper stories of the hospital.”
“The situation is escalating every hour and every minute,” he said.
Israel’s raid began hours after Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, condemned the evacuation orders and reiterated its call for a permanent cease-fire. MSF said some of its staff members were “still in the building” treating patients “amid near impossible conditions.”
“People have been forced into an impossible situation: stay at Nasser Hospital against the Israeli military’s orders and become a potential target, or exit the compound into an apocalyptic landscape where bombings and evacuation orders are a part of daily life,” Lisa Macheiner, MSF’s project coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement. “Hospitals should be considered as safe places and shouldn’t even be evacuated in the first place.”
In a Nasser update posted to social media Thursday morning, MSF said that “following shelling this morning, our staff reported a chaotic situation, with an undetermined number of people killed and injured.”
“Our medical staff have had to flee the hospital, leaving patients behind,” the group said. “Israeli forces set up a checkpoint to screen people leaving the compound; one of our colleagues was detained at this checkpoint. We call for his safety and the protection of his dignity.”
MSF demanded that the Israeli military “immediately stop this attack, as it endangers medical staff and patients who are still stuck inside the facility.”
This post has been updated with new comments from Médecins Sans Frontières.
