The past days have witnessed the high frequency of Israeli targeting of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, so how does Israel work to destroy health care facilities and kill those patients, doctors and staff? How do you justify that?
During the past few days, Nasser Hospital was bombed in Khan Yunis, and the European Hospital in Khan Yunis was discharged from service, and the return hospital in Jabalia was bombed, and Israel issued an evacuation order to Al -Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Today, Al -Jazeera correspondent was transferred, the Indonesian hospital was exposed to the northern Gaza Strip, after Israeli raids targeting its surroundings.
The United Nations Relief and Investigations Organizations accused Israel of seeking to destroy the health infrastructure in Gaza.
Through its attacks, Israel is working to kill the medical staff and the sick, as if the tongue of its condition wanted to kill them with bullets before they die with the disease, which was the cause of their hospitalization or the injury they were exposed to as a result of the Israeli war as well.
The European Hospital Director Imad Al -Hout said in a telephone interview with the New York Times that the raids – which he said without warning – had damaged the walls and pipes, cut off the water supply and removed the hospital from the service, and forced most of the 200 patients to leave.
The attacks on medical facilities reinforce the accusations that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
By early May, the World Health Organization has recorded 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the war began, and these attacks have caused damage to at least 33 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization.
At some point, at least 19 of them made it unable to work, and 5 of them have returned to service since then.
Medical Legal War
In a research article by Nicola Peruvini and Nif Gordon, published in the Journal of Palestinian Studies in April 2024 under the title “Medical Legal War … Nakba and Israel’s attacks on Palestinian health care” The two writers devised the term “medical legal war” to describe how Israel justifies its systematic attacks on health care facilities in the Gaza Strip during its five military attacks on the besieged sector between 2008 and 2023.
The article talked about that Israel is employing the laws of armed conflict related to human shields and “hospital shields”, to give a security character to the infrastructure of life and sustainable and legitimizing their destruction.
The authors described the “medical legal war” as a racist form of dead rule that enhances the logic of the colonial settlement of the exclusion based on the exclusion, while the Palestinians are accused of causing a disaster for themselves.
The authors said that the multiple tours of the military attacks carried out by Israel since the imposition of the siege on Gaza in 2007 should be seen as an intensification of the current pattern of displacement and the colonial settlement judiciary.
Indeed, the 17 -year -old siege had catastrophic effects on the residents of Gaza, as more than two million Palestinians were held in the Strip, which limited their ability to obtain medical treatment, education, employment, economic opportunities, and even family and social life.
The Israeli military siege has made the vast majority of Gaza population to be executed and suffer from malnutrition.
Even before the 2023 war, infant death rate was 22.7 per thousand live births compared to less than 3 deaths per thousand births in Israel.
This means that before the war, the newborn in Gaza was 7 times more likely to die than if they had been born one hour by car in Beersheba or Tel Aviv.
Moreover, the average age expected in Gaza before the war was about 74 years, while the Israelis are expected to live 9 years longer.
This broad gap is due primarily to the sharp differences in the basic factors specified for health between Gaza and Israel, which are increasingly increasing with each escalating round of violence, in addition to the arrival of the per capita GDP in Gaza to about 1050 dollars in 2021 compared to 51 thousand and 100 dollars in Israel.
Extermination
The authors also talked about the extermination war launched by Israel since October 7, 2023, and said that it is certain that it has led to the serious famine and concerns about the spread of diseases, and given the systematic attacks on health facilities and lack of access to health care, it is likely that these diseases will contribute to the already amazing number of deaths in Gaza.
In this way, the Nakba in Gaza continues to be discovered as a result of periodic explosions of violence and continuous structural violence that can be conceived as a group of “social arrangements that are exposed to individuals and population.”
Structural violence is a type of violence that works through “a systematic weakening”, which includes the material destruction of the target group “through overcrowding, malnutrition, epidemics and health care lack.
Consequently, it is often a slow form of violence that destroys the health of the population in a long and depleted way and is clearly less anxious, because it is not immediately clear like the explosive violence that the actor moves and spreads for a certain period of time before it recedes.
The structural forms of violence that affect the health of Palestinians in Gaza include depriving them of health care, lack of health services available and applying strategies that undermine the basic ingredients for health.
Ultimately, Israel systematically weakened the infrastructure of Palestinian health care in Gaza, and since health care is an essential component of the sustainability of the social entity, violent and structural attacks on health care should be understood as part of the continuous eradication strategy of the Nakba that aims to make Gaza not suitable for living, but the Israeli Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter stated publicly on November 11, 2023, saying, “We continue Gaza Nakba. “
Legitimacy to destroy infrastructure
The authors said that Israel is working to legitimize the destruction of life and sustainable infrastructure in Gaza.
According to the laws of armed conflict, “hospitals and health care centers must be respected and protected at all times, and it should not be a target for the attack.”
The two writers analyzed a series of reports, graphs, cartoon fees and videos published by various actors before, during and after the military attacks on Gaza that were launched since the siege of 2007, and followed the emergence and spread of his name “Medical Legal War”, a phrase that was formulated to describe a strategy adopted by the Israeli army and government to give legitimacy on attacks on the infrastructure of life Sustainable by converting the blame for these attacks to the Palestinians themselves.
The “Medical Legal War” constitutes a speech aimed at supporting and justifying a form of excessive racist rule in hatred, a process that reached its climax with the unprecedented targeting of Israel for health care infrastructure in 2023, revealing – if it is permissible to speak – how to use the legal legal war to justify the exclusionary campaign of Israel and turn Gaza into an invaluable space for living.
The necessity of protecting civilians and healthcare facilities
Yesterday, Wednesday, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stressed in a renewed appeal the need to protect civilians and health care facilities in the Gaza Strip.
The office stated that the hostilities intensified during the night with an attack by the Israeli forces on the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Yunis, killing and wounding a number of people, and a team from the World Health Organization was inside the hospital at the time of the attack.
“These attacks are not only exacerbating the deterioration of the already devastating health care system in Gaza, but also exacerbated the shock of patients and the medical staff in these facilities,” said the Humanitarian Coordination Office.
The office stated that the escalation of military activities and the increasing pollution of explosive ammunition increases the risks of safety for civilians, including relief workers, before stressing always the need to protect civilians and health care facilities always.