Gaza 4 – The Unholy Land.

There could not be a more absurd name than the “holy land”.

It is now a year since the ill-fated Hamas led attack on Israel. Not only is there no sign of resolution, but horrors continue to amplify hatred. Sympathy with the hostages and their families continues, but has been swamped after a year of unprecedented Israeli barbarism.

It seems almost inconceivable that any of the Israeli hostages are left alive after a year of captivity in the most dangerous place on earth. The protests of their loved ones are ignored as are international pleas for a cease fire. Meanwhile, away from the worlds view, around 10,000 Palestinians are subject to degrading cruelty in Israeli prisons. Could these too can be regarded as hostages?

Any doctor soon becomes familiar with witnessing pain and loss, but it’s a stern test of imagination to appreciate the suffering of people in Gaza, and now Lebanon, and what their health professionals have been experiencing for the last year, today, tomorrow, and it seems, for a long time into a very dark future.

I have written about how history could foster understanding, the horrible short term impact, and the potential outcomes for the war. I did not imagine that the aim was to render Gaza uninhabitable.

Behind the statistics

Thus far, 42,000 people have died including a heart-breaking 17,000 children, now equal to the global total of 17,000 children who died from COVID19.

Even this is likely to be a wild underestimate as disintegrated public health systems are unable to count deaths accurately, many bodies are still to be found, some never will be. Famine and infectious disease now add to the toll as Israel starves the nation of aid.

One in 40 of Gaza’s doctors and nurses, totalling 765 or so have been killed. So too 138 journalists, 287 aid workers. Again, many times more injured and disabled. Half of the hospitals are destroyed, 32 out of 36 damaged and 17 just functioning. Doctors trying to help are hoping patients die of trauma instead of surviving to return with malnutrition driven complications.

Indeed, without the international aid effort would there be any of the 2 million Palestinians left alive? I think not.

Two tiny examples

Behind the statistics, there is now a vast encyclopaedia of personal tragedies. One of the saddest is two of the 115 infants murdered so far. They were  three-day old twins, killed by Israelis along with their mother and grandmother while the father went out to collect their birth certificates. He had to apply for their death certificates on the same day. With his home demolished and his community destroyed what next for him? The bodies and minds of children have been shattered.

The pipeline of murder

The numbers of the injured, many seriously, suffering pain, trauma, disability, hunger, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and a host of other untreated illnesses are many magnitudes more than the dead. Many of these will be dying without any medical assistance whatsoever.

In other words, just about everyone in Gaza is likely to have a medical diagnosis involving physical or mental damage or both. Disabilities due to serious injuries are common. Therapies and treatments are unavailable and the surviving Gazeans have their own memories and daily hardships to deal without hope of help, justice, or any viable future.

Torture

Many Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have also been indiscriminately arrested. Could they too be termed hostages? They have been routinely tortured, disabled and killed in prisons, not only with intent, but with planning and skill. Medics have been implicated, but also raised voices of protest. The sight of Israeli ‘religious’ extremists attacking a compound on behalf of soldiers who had been charged with raping prisoners was a new, hideous low.

Axis of Evil

There is more than one axis of evil. The USA continually erases its red lines one after another as Israel crosses them with impunity and still there seems no limit to the ordinance pouring into Israel, paid for with USA tax dollars, German Euros and British pounds. This is despite every aspect of International law broken by Israel. I am glad American voters will not have to let Trump in through the back door by being morally unable to vote for “Genocide Joe”.

Despite protestations, the bombs are clearly manufactured, transported, and used with little or no consideration for the murder of civilians. Or any nod to law. Israeli evacuation orders can hardly be called humane, and nowhere is safe.

Might is right

This not a war. It is a destruction, a demolition, an internationally supported genocide perpetrated by the people on earth who should be most sensitive to the evil of persecution and mass murder. Schools, universities, hospitals, and clinics have been intentionally destroyed. So too infrastructure to provide water, sanitation, or waste management has been deliberately targeted. In addition to the human cost, the region is an environmental disaster.

Health care workers are being killed with no one being trained to replace them, and this of course, applies to all the skills needed to run a society. There are no schools or universities left standing.

People with medical conditions are suffering. Any treatment for conditions such as my own MS is unavailable. How many of the 70,000 Gazeans with diabetes have died due to lack of insulin? Polio and other infection diseases are predictably on the march and the Polio vaccination campaign has been an isolated success. No antivaxxers there!

Intent

The political extremists in Israel see this as a once in a century opportunity to redefine the Middle East by bombing their neighbours into oblivion. Trump, quiet on the issue, feels likewise that they should be given everything they need ‘get the job done’ including bombing nuclear facilities in Iran.

Illegal extra-judicial murder of Israel’s enemies is now routine and not reported in the manner which would apply if Israeli leaders were assassinated in Tel Aviv, or in America, or when Russia murdered its enemies in the UK. The murder of opponents in Lebanon and Iran were clearly designed to inflame conflict, and perhaps encourage the never-ending flow of weaponry.

Any plan for the future has yet to emerge, apart from, that is, the end of any concept of an independent Palestine, essential to any lasting peace.

Lesser Israel

Perhaps this is the Greater Israel dreamed of by religious extremists in Israel and which is playing out in the persecuted West Bank. Will the Israelis just have to keep bombing their neighbours into oblivion to prevent inevitable retribution?  How would I feel if I was a young Palestinian or Lebanese? What would I do? What would I want to do?

The attacks on Israel on Oct 7^th last were dreadful, out of control, murderous. But they can be understood given the history and lives of Gazeans at that time. The subsequent destruction of life structure in Gaza is only understandable in terms of the intent to cleanse the region of Palestinian society and create an eternal stateless underclass whose very movement will be electronically monitored, and dissent made impossible.

Unless Netanyahu and his helpers are arrested and prosecuted, or at least penned into their own state, Israel has all but destroyed the concept of international law.

Israel can be seen as a dangerous, extremist, failing state. It is without any doubt guilty of genocide and must be prosecuted further. Top Israeli politicians now travel to nations signed up to the ICJ with will be arrested. Or will they?

Coping

I know people who simply cannot look at what is happening. It is too ugly, and the accompanying feeling of hopelessness and despair might seem pointless. We all find our own way, but for me it’s important to keep up to date with what is happening however grim; to write letters, to donate, and to share in what way we can, the misery, the anger, and the hopeless frustration with defines every second of the lives of Palestinians for the last year, Lebanese now, and it looks like Iranians to come.

Our minds should be very disturbed.

The beauty of peace

I walked today without fear on the edges of Dartmoor and felt grateful for living in a nation not at war, even though we help fuel others. I can think of my family without worrying about them being exploded by bombs, tortured, or experiencing the untreated misery of infection, illness, or permanent, intentionally induced disability.

I can leisurely shop for bread at the local bakers. I can turn on the tap and have drinkable water, have a bath if I choose and have more than one working toilet. I have access to power, waste management and public services. There are schools and hospitals too, creaking perhaps, but fully functioning. In Gaza all this has gone. When will they experience any sort of peace – in what generation? In what century?

I cannot help but think the conflict in the middle east as one of the defining opportunities for humanity to sort out complex problems – we could hardly have done worse.