Irish healthcare workers speak out on destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system

By Dr Angy Skuce Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine

For over a year, we have watched Gaza and its people being bombarded.

Bombs and weapons made in the West being used by Israeli soldiers to kill Palestinians, most of them women and children – in a land that was already known as the biggest open-air prison in the world.

As Irish healthcare workers, many of us have connections with Palestine to varying degrees – colleagues and friends in Ireland who have family there, connections with humanitarian agencies who work there – and we very quickly started getting news of things that were happening that we couldn’t quite comprehend.

A photo from a long-standing colleague of the sight that met his cousin as he arrived for a night-shift in an Emergency Department – the bodies of 5 children aged under 6 years, lying in a row on a hospital trolley, dirty and bloodied; video testimony from a doctor known to us personally, of the Palestinian paediatrician he treated for a foot ulcer, caused by being stripped and forced to stand naked in the same place for 2 days and 2 nights because he wouldn’t leave his patients – and then being allowed to care for his patients, still naked; a conversation over coffee with a surgeon who went on a medical mission to Gaza, whose equipment was taken from him by the Israeli military so that he cut up bath sponges to make dressings for children whose abdomen had been blown open, whose food was weighed and any ‘extra’ taken, so that he couldn’t offer an apple to the surgeon working alongside him who hadn’t seen an apple for 7 months.

The stories got worse – of hospitals being bombed, of drones flying into operating theatres and shooting nurses as they worked, of a missile attack on the ‘safe’ accommodation allocated to an MSF team.

Stories and videos also of the heroes – Palestinian Red Crescent Society paramedics telling jokes to little children as the rubble was lifted off them, others running into danger to drag out people who might be saved, the ambulance crew that drove to certain death in an attempt to save young Hind Rajab; stories of resilience and courage, of poems written about a brighter future that will come.

As healthcare workers, we couldn’t watch what was happening to people, and to an entire healthcare system, and not speak out.

Healthcare workers and infrastructure are protected by international humanitarian law.

They have always been sacrosanct – a red cross on a white background carries more protection than any body armour.

Healthcare workers provide care, with absolute neutrality – our patients are our patients, whoever they are, and we can do this in the most dangerous environments, because we are protected.

A new world order seems to be emerging, where this is no longer true.

Healthcare has become a target.

Israel is deliberately destroying the healthcare system in Gaza – as confirmed by a recent UN report.

We are now getting direct appeals from doctors in Gaza, to call for a ceasefire, to send aid in, to send them doctors and nurses and food.

All of the male staff in Kamal Adwan hospital were taken by the Israeli army last week – all but one paediatrician, and the Medical Director – who received his own child’s body into the hospital.

Still he stays on, doing his best, with grace and dignity, to care for his patients.

There are no surgeons there, no-one to perform life-saving operations on children, although some have been shot in the head and in the heart (by the most highly-trained, best-equipped soldiers in the world) and so are not saveable.

Irish healthcare workers protesting outside the Dail.

There are no paramedics left in north Gaza, so there is no one to call when a house is bombed and 12 people lie injured under the rubble.

The Geneva Declaration, which underpins all medical ethics, says that ‘my colleagues are my sisters and my brothers’.

We could not hear these calls for help from our colleagues in Gaza and not respond.

Many months ago, we joined together as an informal group – Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine – to peacefully advocate for the safety of children and healthcare workers in Palestine.

We have 379 members from all over Ireland, and are doing all we can to stop the carnage.

We hold vigils, reading the names of the 1,000+ healthcare workers who have been killed and the many hundreds who have been detained.

We walk together at the national demonstrations.

We peacefully protest at events or businesses in Ireland that support the ongoing genocide.

We create petitions, hold events outside the Dail, ask our professional bodies to call for a ceasefire, raise awareness about what is being done to the people of Palestine and how Ireland is complicit in it.

We will continue to call on our government to enact the Occupied Territories Bill, to ensure that no bombs pass through or over Ireland to kill the children of Gaza, and to withdraw all support, economic or otherwise, for agencies that contribute to genocide.

Anyone who shares our aims is welcome to join us, and we urge everyone to make Human Rights in Palestine (and now Lebanon) an election issue.

When people come canvassing, ask them what they have done to end the genocide, and ask them if it’s working.