By Dr Angy Skuce Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine
Last week, the UN Security Council was told in a briefing that conditions in the Gaza Strip are ‘unfit for human survival’.
Despite protests all over the world, and repeated calls by the UN, the World Health Organisation, Unicef, Oxfam, Trocaire and many more for an end to the violence and provision of humanitarian aid, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza is intensifying.
79% of the Gaza strip is under evacuation orders by the Israeli military.
Al Mawasi, the ‘safe zone’ has minimal facilities and is frequently bombed by the Israeli military.
Israel’s siege on the North of Gaza has blocked almost all aid from entering for over a month – food, water, fuel, medical supplies.
Requests by the UN to deliver food and essential supplies to injured starving people are repeatedly denied.
On Monday November 11th, the World Food Programme was allowed by Israel to deliver food to Beit Hanoun in Northern Gaza, where many displaced people were sheltering.
Soon after the delivery, the Israeli military attacked the aid distribution centre, leaving mass casualties.
In one of the houses destroyed that day were Dr Mohammed Shbat, his wife Dr Deema Ashour, and their daughter Ala.
They, along with 30 other people whom they were sheltering, were killed.
Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine are in daily contact with our colleagues in Gaza. Every day, we share on social media a photo and description of a healthcare worker who has been killed, or abducted and detained.
Detained somewhere like Sde Teinem, where sick prisoners are shackled to their bed for weeks on end, blindfolded, and forced to wear nappies, hands and feet needing to be amputated because of injuries from the shackles.
The testimony of hundreds of our colleagues – doctors from all over the world – is of unimaginable cruelty, worse than any of them have seen in any other conflict zone: little children, shot in the head and in the heart ‘where I would put my stethoscope’: a nurse, shot in the chest by a quadcopter that flew into the operating theatre where he was working: a doctor, made to strip and stand naked for 2 days and 2 nights because he wouldn’t leave his patients, urinating and defaecating where he stood – and then being allowed to care for his patients, still naked, as the Israeli soldiers laughed.
Ireland is still trading with Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine that are deemed illegal under international humanitarian law.
We are still playing Israeli national sports teams.
We are still importing goods and services from companies that profit from breaches of human rights.
Ireland invented the boycott in 1880, when we turned our backs on Charles Cunningham Boycott, an English land agent who evicted 1 too many families in Co.Mayo.
We did it again in 1984 when a small group of Dunnes Stores workers refused to handle South African fruit, in protest against the apartheid regime there.
There is a genocide happening in Gaza, and we need to boycott the State that is guilty of perpetrating it.
Irish mothers are boycotting Israeli baby wipes. Irish farmers are boycotting Israeli potatoes.
Irish Healthcare workers are boycotting Israeli medication.
Everyone can do their bit – call on your public representatives to enact the Occupied Territories Bill and ban trade with illegal settlements; demand an end to arms transiting through airport or Irish airspace; tell them to end the EU-Israel trade agreement.
When your grand-children ask what you were doing when the people of Palestine were being slaughtered in their tens of thousands, what will you say?