… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Tag: hospital

  • Rule-of-Law Western Style’: Israeli Assassination Squad Kills Three in Jenin Hospital

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Security footage shows Israeli forces disguised as civilians and medical staff during a raid on Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin, a city in the occupied West Bank, on January 30, 2023.  (Photo: Screengrab via CNN)

    Ibn Sina hospital’s medical director said the Palestinian men were “executed in cold blood.”

    A team of Israeli forces disguised as civilians and medical staff raided Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday and assassinated three Palestinians, claiming without providing evidence that they were using the facility as a hideout and planning an attack inspired by the Hamas-led October 7 assault.

    Journalists on the ground report that there was no apparent attempt to arrest the three individuals, whom the Israeli military identified as Mohammed Jalamneh, Mohammed Ghazawi, and his brother Basel Ghazawi. Ibn Sina’s medical director said the three men were “executed in cold blood.”

    Al Jazeera reported that “Hamas confirmed that Jalamneh was one of its members.”

    “The Jenin Brigade, which includes a number of Palestinian armed resistance groups, said in a statement that two of the three men were members of Islamic Jihad,” the outlet added.

    A hospital spokesperson told The Associated Press that 18-year-old Basel Ghazawi “had been a patient in the hospital since October with partial paralysis.”

    Security footage from the hospital shows Israeli forces dressed as civilian women and medical workers moving through a facility hallway and waiting area with assault rifles drawn.

    Citing Palestinian officials, AP reported that the Israeli forces “opened fire inside the wards” of the hospital, located in the West Bank city of Jenin.

    Palestinian health officials “condemned the raid and called on the international community to pressure Israel’s military to halt such operations in hospitals,” AP added. “A hospital spokesperson said there was no exchange of fire, indicating that it was a targeted killing.”

    Hospitals have special protections under international law, but Israel has treated them as legitimate targets for military operations since October 7, endangering wounded patients and medical personnel by raiding and shelling the facilities at will.

    Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, sardonically described the Israeli forces’ Jenin hospital raid as “rule-of-law Western style” and rejected the notion that “you can kill anyone you like on a land that you are illegally occupying, brand him/her terrorist, and then vilify as antisemites the ancestors of everyone who questions your right to kill anyone you like on a land that you are illegally occupying.”

    Al Jazeera‘s Charles Stratford, reporting from Ramallah, said Tuesday that “the Israeli army often surrounds and in some instances has attacked the three Palestinian hospitals in Jenin during nightly raids on the city.”

    “But this is the first time they have entered a civilian medical facility in what seems to have been a well-planned, targeted assassination operation that Palestinian authorities are calling another violation of international law,” said Stratford.

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • Palestinian and international networks demand Israel release hospital director Dr. Ahmed Muhanna

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    Original article by Peoples Health Dispatch republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    Al Awda Association and the People’s Health Movement launched a campaign for the release of Dr. Ahmed Muhanna, director of Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza

    Dr. Ahmed Muhanna appeared on numerous international news stations calling for an end to Israel’s attacks on health workers. Photo: Screenshot

    Al Awda Health and Community Association and the People’s Health Movement (PHM) have launched a campaign calling for the release of Dr. Ahmed Muhanna, the director of Al Awda’s hospital in the area of Tal Al-Zaatar in Jabalya, northern Gaza. PHM has also called for an end to Israeli attacks on health workers in Palestine, warning that the “deliberate targeting of the healthcare system by Israel is a blatant war crime.”

    Dr. Muhanna was detained by Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) following a raid on Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalya that began on December 17. While other staff members were detained by Israeli soldiers, they were released after several hours of questioning. On the other hand, Dr. Muhanna was not released, and his current status remains unknown.

    The director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalya became an unofficial spokesperson for health workers in Palestine since Israel started its latest round of attacks on October 7. From the very beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza, Dr. Muhanna kept contact with regional and international organizations, sharing situation reports to illustrate the dire state of hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

    Read more: World faces days of “moral decay” as Israel bulldozes hospital grounds, detains more doctors

    Along with other members of the staff, Dr. Muhanna was also one of the health workers who refused to abandon the hospital after receiving evacuation orders from the Israeli occupation in the earlier phases of the war. At the time, Dr. Muhanna said the evacuation “is not possible,” given the serious conditions of several patients. “The hospital staff is determined to stay and provide health care to patients,” he asserted at the time.

    Shortly before his arrest, Dr. Muhanna sent a new message to Al Awda’s network of contacts, saying: “No one can move in the hospital because of the [Israeli] sniper. The situation in the hospital is terrible. We have 38 patients, some of them lacking medicine. We have no oxygen and only very little fuel for a small generator. We have food for 2 to 3 days tops. The situation is critical.”

    Al Awda Association and PHM have called on health workers and activists around the world to denounce Dr. Muhanna’s arrest and apply pressure on their governments to push Israeli authorities to free him. The organizations are also inviting health workers to organize actions in support of Dr. Muhanna and his comrades in the Gaza Strip, making their struggle visible in their workplaces.

    People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

    Original article by Peoples Health Dispatch republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

  • ‘As a Human Being, I Beg’: Doctors Say Cease-Fire in Gaza Only Way to Save Countless Lives

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    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Trauma surgeons treat an injured man after Israeli bombardment, at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 21, 2023  (Photo: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)

    Fresh demands for a major increase in humanitarian aid and an end to the bombing came as Gaza’s only cancer hospital shut down due to a lack of fuel.

    As the World Health Organization warns of an “imminent public health catastrophe” in Gaza amid Israeli attacks on medical workers and infrastructure, doctors and other frontline medics said Wednesday that only an immediate cease-fire would give them a fighting chance to save countless lives.

    Responding Wednesday to the shutdown of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only cancer treatment center—due to lack of fuel and damage from Israeli airstrikes, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “no words can describe our concern for the patients who have just lost the only possibility to receive lifesaving cancer treatment or palliative care.”

    Tedros added: “I urge and I plead—for full medical and fuel aid access NOW! The more we wait, the more we put these fragile lives at risk.”

    The WHO chief’s plea came a day after Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based United Nations agency, warned that “an imminent public health catastrophe… looms with the mass displacement, the overcrowding, the damage to water and sanitation infrastructure.”

    Meanwhile, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that “child deaths due to dehydration, particularly infant deaths due to dehydration, are a growing threat.”

    The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called Gaza a “graveyard” for children, more than 3,600 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombardment, with another 1,000 minors reported missing, according to Palestinian and other officials.

    Israeli forces have attacked numerous hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical workers, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and al-Hilu Hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that the bombardment that damaged al-Hilu “endangers the lives of women in the maternity wards and medical staff.”

    According to an “urgent call for protecting healthcare workers in Gaza” published Tuesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, Israeli forces have attacked 57 medical facilities since launching the war on Gaza on October 7, killing 73 workers—including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others—as of October 24. Sixteen of the medical personnel were killed while on duty.

    As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exacts a heavy toll on overwhelmed medical workers and infrastructure in the besieged strip, frontline medics like Dr. Noureddein al-Khateeb—a 38-year-old resident doctor in the emergency department at the Nasser Medical Center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis—say they are living “in a constant state of threat and fear.”

    “It’s constant fear on top of the exhaustion we’re experiencing,” al-Khateeb toldThe New Humanitarian on Wednesday. “But one shouldn’t think of that too much. I can’t. If I do, I won’t get any work done.”

    Al-Khateeb added that “we’re also afraid for our families’ safety, but what can we do?”

    Dr. Mohamed Abu Mousa, a radiologist at Nasser, said one of the few trips he’s made outside the hospital since Israeli bombardment began was to bury his 7-year-old son after he was killed in an October 15 Israeli airstrike on their family home.

    “We don’t have the luxury of pausing to grieve,” he told The New Humanitarian. “The heartache is immense, but the wounded are endless. We have to keep going.”

    Conditions are dire inside Gaza’s hospitals, which are running out of or low on fuel, medicines, equipment, and other essential services and supplies.

    “We’re operating on children without anesthetics,” Léo Cans, who heads the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) mission in Palestine, toldCNN Tuesday. “We don’t have morphine for them.”

    On Wednesday, MSF international president Dr. Christos Christou said in a video published on social media that “we’ve seen and heard the stories of the hell being unleashed on Gaza” as “helpless people are being subjected to horrific bombing” and “families have nowhere to run or hide.”

    Christou continued:

    So many people need help. What medical staff can do is just a drop in the ocean compared to the immense needs. Our teams working in Gaza are exhausted and terrified. Our staff tell us that pregnant women can’t get to hospitals to deliver. People are stuck under the rubble of shelled-out buildings. Children are having limbs amputated while lying on the floor.

    “An immediate cease-fire is the only way the people of Gaza can find safety and the essential aid they urgently need,” Christou asserted. “The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop now… As a human being, I beg—stop the bombing and allow people in Gaza to live.”

    The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that at least 8,796 Palestinians—including nearly 2,300 women and over 3,600 children—have been killed in Israeli attacks, while around 23,000 other people have been injured.

    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common

    Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).