There is no longer an effective health system in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children have limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and people requiring dialysis lack treatment. The last oncological hospital in Gaza has stopped functioning. An estimated 50 pregnant women do not have a safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates have increased by 000 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed out. There is no sanitation or drinking water. Hospitals were bombed and bombed. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is "on the verge of collapse." Clinics as well as ambulances – 300 in Gaza and more than 79 in the West Bank – were destroyed. Some 212 doctors, nurses and health workers have been killed – more than the total of all health workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 400. More than 2016 others have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.

Israeli soldiers regularly enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations – on Wednesday, soldiers entered al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis and demanded that doctors and displaced Palestinians leave – as well as to round up the detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical personnel. On Tuesday, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin, West Bank, and murdered three Palestinians as they slept.

Cuts in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) – collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the October 7 attack of 12 of its 13 000 UNRWA employees – will accelerate the horror, as attacks, famine, lack of health care and the spread of infectious diseases in Gaza have turned into a tidal wave of death.

The unsubstantiated accusations, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all UNRWA personnel in Gaza have ties to Islamist militant groups, were published in the Wall Street Journal. The journalist, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the many lies Israel has used to justify its genocide, including “decapitated babies” and “mass rapes,” it is reasonable to assume that this may be another fabrication.

The allegations, details of which remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees – almost certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to see 17 countries, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and Japan, reduce or delay funding for this vital United Nations agency. UNRWA is all that separates Gaza's Palestinians from starvation. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, are maintaining funding.

Eight of the UNRWA employees accused of participating in the October 7 attack in southern Israel, where 1 people were killed and 139 kidnapped, have been fired. Two were suspended. UNRWA has promised an investigation. They represent 240 percent of UNRWA staff.

Israel seeks to destroy not only Gaza's health system and infrastructure, but also UNRWA, which provides food and aid to 2 million Palestinians. The goal is to make Gaza uninhabitable and ethnically cleanse Gaza's 2,3 million Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of people are already starving. More than 70 percent of homes were destroyed. More than 26 people were killed and more than 700 were injured. Thousands of people are missing. About 65 percent of Gaza's pre-war population has been displaced, with most living in the open. Palestinians are reduced to eating grass and drinking contaminated water.

Noga Arbell, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official, said during a debate in the Israeli parliament on January 4: "It will be impossible to win the war unless we destroy UNRWA, and that destruction must begin immediately." .”

“UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2018. “It also perpetuates the narrative of the so-called 'right of return' with the aim of eliminating the state of Israel, and UNRWA must therefore disappear.”

An unnamed senior Israeli official welcomed the suspension of UNRWA funding, but insisted Wednesday that the government was not calling for it to be shut down.

More than 152 UNRWA employees in Gaza – including school principals, teachers, health workers, a gynecologist, engineers, support staff and a psychologist – have been killed since the Israeli attacks began. More than 141 UNRWA installations were destroyed by the bombings. This is the largest loss of personnel in conflict in UN history.

The destruction of health facilities and the targeting of doctors, nurses and medical staff is particularly abhorrent. This means that the most vulnerable, the sick, infants, wounded and elderly, and those who care for them, are often sentenced to death.

Palestinian doctors are imploring doctors and medical organizations around the world to denounce the attack on the health system and mobilize their institutions in protest.

“The world must condemn the acts against medical professionals occurring in Gaza,” writes Al-Shifa Hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who was arrested along with other medical staff by the Israelis in November 2023 while being evacuated with the help of the World Health Organization from the convoy, and who remains in detention. “This correspondence is a call to every human being, to all medical communities and to all health professionals around the world to demand that these anti-hospital activities in and around hospitals cease, this which is a civil obligation according to international law, the UN and the WHO.”

But these institutions – with a few notable exceptions, such as the American Public Health Association which has called for a ceasefire – have either remained silent or, like Dr. Matthew K. Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and in humanities from the University of Colorado, attempted to justify Israeli war crimes. These doctors – who find it acceptable that in Gaza a child is killed every 10 minutes on average – are complicit in the genocide and violate the Geneva Convention. They see death as a solution, not life.

Robert Jay Lifton, in his book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,” writes that “genocidal plans require the active participation of educated professionals – doctors, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers. – which combine to create not only the technology of genocide, but also much of its ideological justification, moral climate, and organizational process.

In November 2023, a group of 100 Israeli doctors defended the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, claiming they were being used as Hamas command centers, an accusation Israel could not verify.

Deans of American medical schools and major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA), have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media in turning their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA ended debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and called for "medical neutrality", although it abandoned "medical neutrality" to denounce the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

There is a cost to denouncing this genocide, a cost they do not intend to pay. They are afraid of being attacked. They fear destroying their career. They fear losing their funding. They fear a loss of status. They fear being persecuted. They fear social isolation. This fear makes them complicit.

And what about those who speak out? They are called anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism. Lara Sheehi, a professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University, has been fired. Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth was denied a fellowship at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy because of his alleged "anti-Israel bias." Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor in San Francisco, was sued for supporting Palestinian rights. Shahd Abusalama was suspended from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK after a vicious smear campaign, although the institution later accepted her discrimination claim against her. Professor Jasbir Puar of Rutgers University is a constant target of the Israel lobby and faces constant harassment. Medical students and professors in Canada risk suspension or expulsion if they publicly criticize Israel.

The danger is not only that Israeli crimes will be denounced. The danger, more importantly, is that the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of institutions and their leaders will be exposed.

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