Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories, reacted forcefully to the complete destruction by the Israeli military of Kamal Adwan Hospital at Beit Lahia in northern Gaza and the arrest and abuse of its patients and its director. She called for a world-wide medical boycott of Israel, writing at “X”
- I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.
She was concurring with San Francisco-based physician and author Rupa Marya .
Muhammad Muhsin Watad at the Israeli newspaper Arab 48 explained that last Friday, “the Israeli army stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital after hours of besieging it. They burned its facilities, mistreated those inside, including patients, the injured, and medical staff, before taking into custody several individuals and forcing others [including women] to strip in the severe cold and undergo forced evacuation, all while gunfire and tank shelling occurred in the surrounding area.” Some 350 staff and patients were illegally detained by Israeli forces, though most were subsequently released.
The actions were part of Israel’s strategy of forcibly displacing 400,000 Palestinians from northern Gaza and making it uninhabitable for them, as the occupying army systematically detonates buildings and destroys neighborhoods. The forced displacement of an occupied population is a war crime. Gaza Palestinians are huddling in tents or sleeping rough amid heavy downpours and frigid temperatures in which several babies are known to have died in recent days.
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BEIT LAHIA, GAZA – DECEMBER 25: Palestinians gather following the Israeli attack on the courtyard of Kamal Adwan Hospital and its surrounding buildings in Beit Lahia, Gaza on December 25, 2024. (Photo by Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Also on Friday, having emptied and burned the hospital, the Israelis detained its director and other medical staff.
Watad at Arab 48 says that the Government Media Office in Gaza is alleging that Abu Safieh was subjected to physical and psychological abuse. He was forced to strip out of his medical coat and clothing and was used as a human shield. His children called on the international community to pressure Israel to release their father, whose fate remains unknown.
He was last seen walking outside the ruined hospital toward the turret of an Israeli tank.
“Abu Safieh,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, 2024
When dissidents in other countries have faced tanks, they have been celebrated widely in US media. American mass media “news” for the most part have ignored Abu Safieh and his fate.
Medical boycotts are not unprecedented. Physicians in the allied victor states of WW I boycotted the German scientific and medical establishment on the grounds that German researchers and physicians were guilty of praising German militarism and denying German war guilt. They even founded alternative associations, such as the one to fight tuberculosis set up in Berlin, and held international congresses only in French and English, excluding German-speakers.
Medical boycotts of Israel have also been proposed previously, as with the 2007 call of some British physicians for non-cooperation with the Israeli Medical Association for failing to uphold ethical standards in their treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They urged that the IMA be kicked out of the World Medical Association.
As I have noted before, the Rome Statute underpinning the International Criminal Court, which went into effect in 2002, lists among “War Crimes” “ix) Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives.” The Israeli army’s allegations that hospitals in Gaza are armed camps and weapons depots is ridiculous, and such assertions have been disproven whenever newspapers of record such as the Washington Post have investigated them.
I have pointed out that Axis powers behaved in much the same way as the Israelis and that attempts were made to try the responsible officers at Nuremberg:
- Japanese soldiers commanded by General General Tomoyuki Yamashita then invaded Singapore in February 1942. They advanced inland. One of their targets was the British Military Hospital, now called the Alexandra Hospital. The number of its patients had swollen to more than 900, though it was constructed for a maximum of 500 beds. The Japanese trained artillery fire on the hospital on February 14 and by the afternoon of that day their troops were approaching the hospital. A British officer’s attempt to show them his Red Cross armband as a bona fide that he was medical personnel was ignored by the Japanese, who fired at him but missed.
The Japanese invaded the hospital. They indiscriminately fired at the people they found there, but arrested and ultimately executed others. Some of the prisoners were killed when Japan abruptly began shelling the compound again. It was a massacre. After the war, prosecutors wanted to bring Japanese commanders up on charges at Nuremberg for the hospital massacre. They could not, however, identify the individuals responsible. There is no doubt that if those Japanese officers had been fingered, they would have been executed.
I don’t think, in contrast, it would be hard to identify the Israeli officers responsible for the destruction of the Kamal Adwan hospital or the attacks on many other hospitals in Gaza.
Later on, the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, article 18, would specify that: “Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”
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