05.09.2024

Israeli F-35 and F-16: UK-made bits and pieces

A total, not a partial, ban

Medics testify in an open letter to Sir Keir Starmer that the IDF is deliberately targeting children, hospitals and healthworkers. They call for ending economic, diplomatic and military support, reports James Linney

This week a group of 30 mostly NHS-based doctors, surgeons and nurses, who have all volunteered to work in hospitals in Gaza since October 7, published an open letter to Sir Keir Starmer.¹ In it they detail some of the atrocities they have witnessed during their time in various hospitals throughout Gaza.

These include the deliberate targeting and killing of children by the Israeli military, the systematic destruction of hospitals and the murder of healthcare workers. Additionally, through the withholding and obstruction of aid, water, medicine and fuel, they say Israel has purposely caused epidemics of infections and malnutrition on a mass scale.

The letter goes on to call for Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy, with all their “extensive legal background” to acknowledge that Israel is daily breaching international humanitarian law and that Britain therefore should immediately withhold economic and diplomatic support. There should be an immediate ban on the supply of all weapons going to Israel, not just a partial ban - just 30 out of 350 export licences have been suspended.

The authors say it is incumbent on Starmer and Lammy to support “the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s investigation in the Palestine situation, South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, domestic universal jurisdiction prosecutions, and any other means of judicial, political and diplomatic accountability”.

The letter goes on to set out certain other humanitarian measures that it urges the Labour government to prioritise, such as the opening of border crossings for medical professionals, with aid able to pass easily, the provision of mass immunisation schemes to prevent the further spread of deadly diseases, such as polio, the construction of large field hospitals and the provision of adequate clean water.

These 30 signatories join the hundreds of other international healthcare workers who have bravely volunteered, via NGOs such as Doctors without Borders, the Red Cross and Medical Aid for Palestinians, to work in Gaza since the siege started. These in turn have joined the heroic efforts of Palestinian health workers, doing what they can to save lives in increasingly desperate and dangerous circumstances.

Despite having decades of experience working in multiple war zones, these doctors report the situation in Gaza to be the most difficult they have seen. Their first-hand accounts of trying to treat Palestinian victims with the type of injuries only witnessed when a largely defenceless, dense population is subject to the full might of an advanced military machine, determined on their annihilation, are truly haunting.

Theirs and other doctors’ reports from Gaza tell of treating men, women and children with horrific abdominal shrapnel injuries, people with multiple limb loss, burns so severe that facial features are no longer discernible, babies with bullet head wounds from snipers, and many more appalling cases. One of the many heart-breaking facts of the Gaza conflict is that paediatric trauma surgeons are the most desperately needed and doctors have reported the largest cohort of child amputations ever seen in any war in history.²

Having faced decades of conflict and blockade, Gaza’s healthcare system has been under immense strain for years. Israel’s constant bombing and bombardment of densely populated areas since October 7 has created a truly dire situation.

Save lives

As the open letter describes, now healthcare workers are having to try to treat, operate and save lives where there is extreme overcrowding, no sanitation, often little running water and regular electricity blackouts; where medicines are severely limited and operations are having to take place without any anaesthetic or painkillers. Little surprise that those who survive their initial trauma injuries often die soon after due to contracting hospital-acquired infections, when there are no antibiotics to treat them. Due to their vulnerability to the ever-growing problem of malnutrition, children are particularly vulnerable to these deadly infections.

As the authors of the open letter state,

With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured or both … Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhoea. Jaundice and hepatitis A infection were widespread in the hospitals in which we worked, while the surgical complication rate was near 100%.

As incredibly difficult as these reports are to hear, it is of the upmost importance that they are told. Due to the almost complete restriction by Israel of access to Gaza by independent journalists and UN/World Health Organisation observers, medical professionals are some of the few with the opportunity to document and report to the outside world the reality of the crimes being committed by Israel in its genocidal campaign.

According to the WHO’s most recent update, there have been 40,223 deaths in the Gaza Strip since October 7,³ with 92,981 serious injuries. In addition tens of thousands of missing people are buried under rubble. In July a Lancet journal article concluded that a more accurate conservative estimate is that around 186,000 deaths have occurred in Gaza as a result of the bombardment since October.⁴

Not a single hospital in Gaza is now able to operate effectively and only 16 out the 36 are operating any services at all. Of these 16, 12 are only partially accessible due to insecurity and damage to the buildings. Some of the partially operational hospitals - such as the largest remaining, Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah - are now within the Israeli-ordered evacuation zone. Such hospitals, as well being impossibly overburdened with the sick and injured, have become shelters for the huge number of ever-growing internally displaced Palestinians: more than 90% of its 2.1 million population.

Despite the desperate, but understandable hope held by Gazans that hospitals might represent a sanctuary, compared to their makeshift tents, this sadly has not been the case. Israel has shown that it has no qualms about destroying hospitals - not just as collateral damage, but in many cases purposely targeted. Again according to the WHO, 32 of the 36 hospitals have suffered damage from bombs, while 752 healthworkers have been killed during the conflict, with an additional 982 being seriously injured and 128 detained. Again doctors and other healthcare workers have been invaluable witnesses to these crimes.

Where Israeli officials have bothered to comment on the destruction of hospitals and the killing of staff and patients, their response has not surprisingly been to blame Hamas, claiming it has been using hospitals as command centres, and places to store weapons or house hostages; in each case it has offered little or no evidence to back up their claims.

Consequences

This was the case for two of the largest hospital complexes: Al-Shifa in Gaza City and the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip - both now essentially destroyed.

Al-Shifa Hospital was initially raided in November and again besieged for two weeks by Israeli commandos in March, whilst Nasser Hospital was raided in February. In both cases the Israeli military’s official claims were that these operations were targeting Hamas fighters or infrastructure only, that no civilians were harmed and that their soldiers prevented any disturbance to the hospital’s provision of care.

The reports from healthcare workers in these hospitals paint a very different picture - one where, despite being told to evacuate the hospitals, those that tried were targeted by IDF snipers, doctors were detained and tortured,⁵ premature babies died due to the cutting off of electricity and fuel supply,⁶ leading to the failure of incubators. In both cases WHO requests to access the hospital to facilitate the evacuation of the most seriously unwell patients were denied, and when they were able to access them after the siege they found the compounds scattered with dead bodies hurriedly buried in shallow graves.⁷

After the IDF raids both Al-Shifa and Nasser have become non-functional. Israel has meanwhile horrifically declared both raids a huge success, with government spokesman Avi Hyman saying after the Al-Shifa raid that it will be used as the “gold standard for urban warfare” in the future; no doubt Israel intends further such “gold standard” raids on hospitals in the West Bank, as its horror show spreads wider.

Protected

According to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), hospitals and medical facilities should be protected from any attack. However they lose their protection if they are being used outside their humanitarian function to commit “acts harmful to the enemy” - a term not defined. Even when a hospital loses its protection, IHL states that any attacking force is obliged to prevent harm to the functioning of the hospital, its staff and patients, and any attack must be “proportional”. Clearly Israel has breached IHL guidelines. Even if it had provided good evidence that Hamas was using the hospitals as control centres or for weapons storage, its attempt to claim the raids were in anyway proportional enters the realm of absurdity.

Of course, to rely on international law to curb or punish Israel is a fool’s errand, Israel has been in the business of openly flaunting international law for decades - well before it started its current genocidal war - yet there have never been any legal consequences.

Without functioning medical facilities and staff to run them, the health system has become overwhelmed and totally reliant on outside help. However, as we have seen, food, aid and medical supplies are increasingly finding their entry to Gaza obstructed or threatened. Just this week the UN food agency, the World Food Programme, had to suspend operations after one of its vehicles, despite being clearly marked, was fired on by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint.⁸

Both the direct murder of Gazans through bombing, shelling and shooting and their indirect murder through the manufacture of a healthcare crisis, mass starvation and infections are part of the plan; namely the annihilation or displacement of the population in the Gaza Strip.

These hideous atrocities will continue, with Israel safe in the knowledge that any attempt to enforce international law will be vetoed by the US, including by whoever replaces Joe Biden come November.