As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.
“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel's full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.#FreeDrHussanAbuSafiya https://t.co/qzZ7CqufI6
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) December 30, 2024
Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.
After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor on Saturday published accounts from witnesses to alleged IDF war crimes during the Kamal Adwan raid, including “deliberate killings, field executions, as well as sexual and physical assaults on women and girls from medical teams and displaced women in the area.”
CNN reported Monday that Abu Safiya is believed to be held at Sde Teiman, the notorious prison in Israel’s Negev Desert where dozens of detainees have died and former inmates say many others have been tortured and raped. The IDF dubiously claimed that Abu Safiya is “suspected of being a Hamas terrorist operative.”
Dr Sufiya is the kind if man Steven Spielberg would make a movie about and he’d become an American hero if we lived in a world with even a baseline level of moral consistency https://t.co/qTkZn4mBPR
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 30, 2024
On Sunday, Israeli forces also attacked al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City, killing seven people, according to Gaza Civil Defense officials. Israel said the strike targeted Hamas militants, without providing further information. Anadolu also reported an IDF artillery attack on the Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday said it was “appalled” by the Kamal Adwan raid and called out the “systematic dismantling of the health system” in Gaza by Israeli forces.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – who on Thursday survived a deadly Israeli airstrike on Sanaa International Airport in Yemen – on Sunday condemned and demanded an end to IDF attacks on Gaza hospitals.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” Tedros said on X. “We repeat: Stop attacks on hospitals. People in Gaza need access to healthcare. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid. Cease-fire!”
Hospitals in #Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat.
Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern #Gaza is out of service — following the raid, forced patient and staff evacuation and the detention of its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya two…
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) December 30, 2024
Marya, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco who is currently on paid suspension after questioning whether an incoming student from Israel – where IDF service is near-universal – took part in war crimes in Gaza, posted Monday in support of the day of action.
“It is absolutely essential that when we see any entity, any group, destroying healthcare, and using the destruction of healthcare as a way to accelerate the annihilation of a people, as Israel is doing, it is absolutely urgent that the global medical community calls to stop this,” Marya told Common Dreams on Monday.
“And we stop it through demanding an arms embargo, demanding unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza, and demanding the end to all institutional relationships between our medical institutions and Israeli institutions,” she continued. “What we need to do right now is to stop the normalization of genocide, enablement, and perpetration in our spaces of healthcare.”
“What we’re seeing is genocide… accelerated through targeting the people who are supposed to heal,” Marya added. “The healthcare system in Gaza has been targeted in order to accelerate the annihilation of the Palestinian people. And if the global healthcare community does not stand up right now, this will be the future of all wars.”
Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.