As the Israeli invasion of Gaza City advances, al-Shifa Hospital is facing severe shortages of essential medical supplies, leaving patients untreated and vulnerable. Staff and patients fear an imminent Israeli attack.
Growing reports show that Israel has been fomenting armed gangs to loot food supplies in Gaza and sow chaos — and it’s killing those who attempt to stop it. But this strategy isn’t new: Israel has waged a war on Gaza’s civil government from the start.
Over more than a year of war, I have volunteered to help my people in Gaza, wrapping friends and family into shrouds, but also helping bring new life into the world.
Medical staff at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital are refusing to abandon their patients after an Israeli evacuation order. “If we leave our positions, we will fail ourselves and our society,” a doctor at the hospital told Mondoweiss.
Polio had been eradicated in the Gaza Strip but was detected this past week. While it is unclear how it has suddenly reappeared it is beyond doubt how it’s spreading: Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure.
Israeli forces killed three Palestinians, including a woman and a teenager in Tulkarem’s Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Israel has been forced into a war of attrition as the Palestinian resistance has reconstituted itself across Gaza. The scale of the horrors perpetrated by the Israeli army in these battles only emerges through testimonies after the fighting ends.
This genocidal war brings with it the systematic destruction of all of Gaza’s health system. This has created a new category of people who die from preventable illnesses due to a systematic lack of access to medical care.
As a journalist I have listened to countless stories of Nakba survivors. They would always say, “we thought we would return.” I never imagined that in my lifetime I would be witnessing another Nakba, and saying the same thing.
The bar for hospitals to lose protected status under international law is set very high. Those conditions were not met for any of the 36 hospitals in Gaza that Israel destroyed.