After more than a year of war, Gaza’s health sector is in tatters. Its destruction is the result of a deliberate policy by Israel, accused, on Thursday, October 10, the independent international commission of the United Nations in charge of investigating the occupied Palestinian territories. According to her, the attacks against medical personnel and infrastructure, as well as the reinforced siege imposed on the Palestinian enclave, respond to a “collective punishment” inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza.
“The attacks on medical facilities are an intrinsic part of the broader attack by Israeli security forces against Palestinians in Gaza and [contre] the physical and demographic infrastructure of Gaza, as well as efforts to expand the occupation.”states in a report the commission, headed by South African lawyer Navi Pillay, and made up of two other experts, one Indian and the other Australian. “Israeli security forces deliberately killed, injured, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and attacked medical vehicles.”they write, believing that such acts are comparable to “war crimes” already “crimes against humanity. »
The report presented on Thursday, of around twenty pages, covers the period from October 2023 – launch of the Israeli offensive in Gaza in retaliation for the bloody attack by Hamas against the Jewish State – until August 2024. It challenges, in several sometimes, the Israeli narrative. which justifies the army’s action due to the presence of Palestinian combatants in these health structures, which they claim not to have them. “I found the proof.” This is the case, in particular, of the attacks carried out in November against the maternity and intensive care departments of the Al-Shifa hospital, that of the Turkish hospital that same month, located in the center of the territory, as well as that of the Al -Shifa. Awda Hospital, in the North, in November-January. Regarding the clashes that took place around Al-Shifa hospital in March, “despite the presence of thousands of civilians”The commission accuses both parties of having violated international humanitarian law.
Hamas also attacked
The researchers carried out their work remotely. Israeli authorities did not respond to their requests, unlike Palestinian officials and the Ministry of Health in Gaza, under the authority of Hamas.
The report, which is not limited to the Gaza health sector, also denounces a policy of“systematic abuse” (torture, humiliation, sexual violence, mass arrests, even of minors) against Palestinians detained in Israel, and the speech of “legitimization of revenge and violence” Israeli officials, including several ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Their work does not exclude Hamas and its Palestinian allies in Gaza: they are also accused of “war crimes” and of “crimes against humanity” towards hostages held in Gaza: torture, ill-treatment, rape or sexual violence.
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