I noticed plenty of loss of life in Gaza. Not pure loss of life. Brutal, methodical killing. However there’s something notably horrific about digging up medics buried of their uniforms that has stayed with me.
Final yr, I used to be working as a senior United Nations official coordinating humanitarian help in Palestine when Palestine Pink Crescent Society (PRCS) and Civil Defence first responders went lacking in southern Gaza.
For per week after they had been killed, we didn’t know in the event that they had been useless or alive. Each day we tried to achieve them. Israeli forces denied us entry. We encountered blocked roads and troops firing on individuals fleeing.
On March 30, my colleagues and I stood over a mass grave in Rafah marked with the sunshine from one of many ambulances that Israeli forces had crushed and dumped close by.
There was no manner that Israeli forces didn’t know that these had been medics. The lights of their ambulance had been flashing. It was marked with internationally protected Pink Crescent symbols, and so they had been carrying uniforms and gloves. It made no distinction. They had been killed, some executed at shut vary. Forensic analysis of video and audio recordings has reconstructed the final moments of their lives.
After investigating, the Israeli military dismissed the deputy commander of the Golani Brigade for submitting an incomplete report. One other commander obtained a letter of reprimand. Nobody was charged. That was the accountability for massacring medics.
The PRCS had been focused earlier than, together with throughout the rescue try of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old lady who bled to loss of life in a automotive riddled with 335 bullet holes, surrounded by the our bodies of her household. The medics despatched to save lots of her had been killed by troops within the space, regardless of acquiring prior coordination to permit the ambulance to reach on the scene.
Coordination with Israeli forces didn’t defend the medics making an attempt to achieve Hind. But the absence of such coordination was utilized by Israeli forces of their justification for killing the ambulance crews in Rafah. An evacuation order for Rafah was issued by Israeli forces after we had misplaced contact with the ambulance crew in Rafah. However even when the ambulances had been knowingly driving into an space of navy operations, it’s the Israeli military’s accountability to not goal civilians.
We had put in place a coordination system – as we do in lots of locations on the planet – to assist events to the battle fulfil their obligations. However in Gaza, the system was twisted by Israeli authorities to regulate the place help reached and to allow a free-fire method from Israeli forces, until it was coordinated in any other case. The humanitarian neighborhood was basically coordinating actions in an effort to decide out of being killed by default.
In Gaza, survival itself was beneath assault. As soon as individuals had been ordered out of an space, the whole lot wanted to outlive was destroyed. Hospitals had been by no means spared. We walked via the ruins of al-Shifa, the place our bodies lay within the courtyard and relations combed via rubble on the lookout for their family members. We evacuated sufferers from the Nasser and Indonesian hospitals, the place road cats sat on the ICU beds of sufferers left to die and the place Israeli forces took a wounded man out of our ambulance, mocking him whereas he screamed in ache.
My colleagues and I spent two years negotiating exceptions – not the rule – to obtain gasoline, medicines, surgical provides. Each merchandise that entered Gaza was a concession, potential solely after intense political strain from governments with extra leverage over Israel than worldwide regulation itself.
The UN Fee of Inquiry confirmed in 2025 that Israeli authorities knew that blocking the entry of humanitarian help into Gaza would result in the deaths of Palestinians. I can verify that they knew as a result of I used to be one of many individuals who informed them. Inadequate help wasn’t a logistical drawback; it was a repeated political selection made with full information. Whereas we spent months negotiating for Palestinians to be allowed to outlive, we had been offered each day with the proof that the intention was the truth is for them to die.
That is what genocide appears to be like like. It isn’t solely the killing – although the killing has been huge and documented. Additionally it is the deliberate dismantling of the whole lot a inhabitants must survive: their hospitals, their water, their meals provide, their civil registry, their police, their medics.
Surviving an air strike means dying within the rubble. Surviving the rubble means bleeding out whereas ambulances watch for a clearance that doesn’t come. Surviving damage means arriving at a hospital bombed right into a shell. Surviving hospital means being discharged right into a tent that may’t preserve out the rain.
I’ve spent most of my grownup life watching assaults on healthcare grow to be normalised. Fourteen years with Docs With out Borders took me via conflicts the place hospitals had been bombed and employees killed. In Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015, 42 people were killed – sufferers burned of their beds, employees shot from the air as they fled a compound whose GPS coordinates had been shared with US forces. America known as it a mistake. However the authorized setting through which that so-called mistake was potential had been intentionally constructed – and Israel was one in every of its architects.
A 2006 Israeli Supreme Court ruling laid the groundwork for legally justifying civilian hurt by widening the definition of “direct participation in hostilities”, creating a gray zone that expanded within the US-led “conflict on terror” to loosen the foundations of conflict for anybody proximate to resistance.
The UN Safety Council responded to a rising variety of assaults on hospitals with Resolution 2286 in Might 2016, reaffirming the protected standing of the medical mission. Within the decade that adopted, the World Health Organization (WHO) documented assaults on healthcare rising yr after yr. Typically when a state was accountable, the justification was a conflict in opposition to “terrorism”.
Gaza is the place this historical past arrives at its conclusion. A documented sample, pioneered by the perpetrator, renders the phrase “mistake” meaningless.
The coverage didn’t pause after we dug up these our bodies. Inside days, Israeli forces struck al-Ahli Hospital, destroying its emergency division. The European Gaza Hospital was put out of service, eliminating the one neurosurgical, cardiac and most cancers remedy in Gaza. Kamal Adwan Hospital, the only malnutrition remedy centre in northern Gaza, was forced to close. A double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital killed 22 individuals, together with 4 well being employees and 5 journalists.
I used to be expelled from Palestine in July for saying publicly what I had witnessed. However eradicating witnesses doesn’t take away the crime. In August, two UN particular rapporteurs referred to the assaults on the well being system as “medicide”.
The systematic assault on healthcare was not reserved for Gaza solely. Israeli forces killed no less than 222 medical and emergency aid employees in Lebanon from October 2023 to November 2024, attacking 67 hospitals, 56 main healthcare centres and 238 emergency medical groups. This yr, within the span of lower than a month, there have been no less than 128 Israeli strikes on medical facilities and ambulances in southern Lebanon. According to the WHO, 51 well being employees have been killed, with 9 extra paramedics killed on Saturday, and greater than 120 wounded.
The worst single second for such assaults got here on March 13 when Israeli forces bombed the healthcare centre in Burj Qalaouiyah, killing 12 docs, paramedics and nurses on obligation. The Gaza doctrine had arrived in Lebanon.
The sample is clear and undeniable. However with out accountability, impunity fuels the killing machine. With every passing day, the precedent strengthens – and civilians in every single place are much less protected.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
