UNHCHR: Israel Guilt of Deliberately Destroying Gaza Healthcare and … Extermination
Juan Cole 10/12/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In a report dated October 11 the United Nations Office of the High Commission on Human Rights concluded that Israel has implemented a deliberate policy of destroying Gaza’s healthcare system and is guilty of the crime against humanity of “extermination.”
The numbers revealed by the investigation for the first nine months of the war are horrific:
498 attacks on Gaza health facilities by the Israeli military;
- 747 persons were killed directly in those attacks and
969 others were injured
It should be remembered that these clinics and hospitals were not functioning in a normal environment. They were treating some of the nearly 100,000 Palestinians wounded by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of the population. In the first nine months of the war, 20 out of 36 hospitals in the Strip were put completely out of commission by Israeli forces, leaving only 16 limping along with some medical capacity. They faced fuel shortages and lack of electricity (fatal to some ICU patients).
These 16, severely overcrowded, had only 1,490 beds between them. A single hospital in New York City — Mt. Sinai — has that many beds. Those 1,490 beds left in Gaza were supposed to service 2.3 million people even as they were being daily bombarded by Israel.
Because of the Israeli destruction of the hospitals, women can’t get proper prenatal maternity care anymore, endangering their unborn children. American Evangelicals and Catholics who waged a half-century war against Roe v. Wade on behalf of unborn children are completely unconcerned with what the Israeli army is doing to Palestinian children.
These Israeli attacks were systematic and ubiquitous, beginning in the north, extending to the center, and then continuing in May in the south.
Although the Israeli authorities kept claiming that the hospitals were used by Hamas or had Hamas tunnels underneath them, the Commission could find no credible information supporting the truth of these allegations.
The UNHCHR concluded, “Attacks against health-care facilities directly resulted in the killing of civilians, including children and pregnant women, who were receiving treatment or seeking shelter and indirectly led to deaths of civilians owing to the resulting lack of medical care, supplies and equipment, which constitutes a violation of Palestinians’ right to life. The Commission also concludes that such acts constitute the crime against humanity of extermination.”
The Israeli military used the following tactics against clinics and hospitals:
- Airstrikes;
- Sieges, preventing the entry of medical equipment and stopping patients from leaving or entering;
- Issuance of evacuation orders while preventing safe evacuations;
- Raids of hospitals and arrest of physicians, nurses and patients;
- Obstruction of access to medical facilities by humanitarian agencies.
- “The Commission received reports about the deliberate, direct targeting of hospitals, including Awdah, Shifa’ and Nasr hospitals, with sniper fire.”
“Patient,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, 2024
WHO found that in the first months of the war, 78% of the obstruction of clinics and hospitals was through direct military force.
Other statistics were equally alarming
500 physicians and nurses were killed by the Israelis in the first 8 months of the war.
19 staffers of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (their Red Cross) were killed and dozens were arrested and attacked; they said they believed the Israeli authorities intentionally targeted them.
Israeli soldiers also simply rounded up and arrested hundreds of medical personnel, along with patients and journalists, at Shifa’ and Awdah hospitals. At least two senior medical figures died in Israeli prisons. There are still 128 health workers in Israeli prisons.
113 ambulances have been attacked.
50,000 internally displaced persons crowded into al-Shifa’ Hospital, seeking refuge from Israeli indiscriminate bombing of civilians. 12,000 took up residence in Quds Hospital.
The Commission looked at four major hospitals and found that the Israelis attacked each in exactly the same way, “suggesting the existence of operational plans and procedures for attacking health-care facilities.”
That is, Israeli generals sat down in a room and plotted out how they would destroy the hospitals.
This destruction has killed many patients with life-threatening diseases who could no longer get treatment. The Turkish Hospital was the only one with the ability to treat cancer. Since the Israelis closed it, they cut off 10,000 cancer patients from medical care, and of course some have therefore died.
The report concludes,
- “Israeli attacks on medical facilities have led to the injury and death of child patients and have had devastating consequences for paediatric and neonatal care in Gaza hospitals, creating a large, unmet need for complex surgical and medical care for children, including premature babies. Israel has failed to act in the best interests of children and ensure the protection of their rights to life and the highest attainable standard of health care, and it has deliberately created conditions of life that hav e resulted in the destruction of generations of Palestinian children and the Palestinian people as a group.”
Why is the Netanyahu government systematically destroying health care in Gaza? It is in furtherance of its stated goal of “encouraging” the Palestinians of Gaza to allow themselves to be ethnically cleansed from the Strip.