By Richard Burden
3 Jan 2025: The picture on our Home Page is a photo that will come to symbolise the sheer enormity of Israel’s assault on healthcare in Gaza and its attempt to empty the north of Gaza of Palestinians altogether.
It is ethnic cleansing and it is deliberate policy. It is not even secret. It is called “The Generals’ Plan”.
The doctor in the photo is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan hospital – the last hospital in the north that was still at least partly functioning at the end of 2024. Since then, Israeli forces have closed Kamal Adwan down, forcing staff and patients out of the hospital – including those being treated for severe injuries. Five medical staff were reported killed in an Israeli strike last Thursday. Many more hospital staff have now been taken into detention. They include Dr Abu Safiya himself. As I write this, his whereabouts remain unknown (subsequent reports have confirmed that he is being held in the notorious Sde Teiman military base, an Israeli prison—effectively concentration camp—where torture, beatings and even the murders of Palestinian prisoners held without charge) have been reliably reported by both Israeli and Palestinian sources—ed.).
This video graphically illustrates the reality of how Israel is systematically destroying healthcare in Gaza. Please don’t look away.
If you had said five years ago that world leaders would allow a state – any state – to attack hospitals on a daily basis with impunity and utterly destroy civilians’ access to urgent medical treatment, few people would have believed you. But that is what is happening. Indeed, the United States is still enabling the death and destruction to take place with the supply of multi-million dollars-worth of weapons. Other countries are also complicit. Despite having suspended licences for some arms exports to Israel in early autumn, UK-made components for F35 jets are still being supplied to the US with the knowledge that those components will find their way into the very aircraft that are devastating Gaza.
When will world leaders show even a fraction of the courage shown by Dr Hussam Abu Safiya when he stood alone in front of advancing Israeli tanks?
Richard Burden is a former Labour MP and a Trustee of the Balfour Project