As head of Gaza’s ambulance companies, Hani al-Jaafarawi had one of the crucial troublesome jobs amid Israel’s genocidal conflict on the Strip. Even earlier than October 7, his workers was overstretched, overworked and underneath fixed menace. After the beginning of the conflict, al-Jaafarawi grew to become actively concerned within the medical response.
Hospitals, clinics and all well being services have been underneath excessive menace, and every single day Al Jaafarawi’s life hung within the stability. However on June 23, the scales tipped in opposition to him when Israeli forces attacked the Daraj well being clinic in Gaza Metropolis, killing him and 4 different civilians. His solely crime was his dedication to the civil protection of the besieged inhabitants of Gaza.
Based on the Palestinian Ministry of Well being, he was the five hundredth well being employee killed in Gaza.
The killing of Al-Jaafarawi was a part of Israel’s systematic marketing campaign to destroy the supply of public companies in Gaza. It has intentionally focused and killed medical personnel, Palestinian Civil Protection employees, ambulance drivers, rescue groups, police forces, civil engineers, public service employees, assist convoy drivers and civil society leaders with the purpose of making chaos and anarchy in Gaza and demoralizing the inhabitants.
The official justification utilized by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) for the focused killings of those professionals is that they’re affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Motion (Hamas) by advantage of working for presidency establishments in Gaza.
This reasoning is fake. Working for a authorities doesn’t indicate that one helps its political agenda or is a member of the political get together that runs it. We can’t assume that each one Israelis employed by the State of Israel help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conflict crimes, so why ought to we assume something about Palestinian civil servants and their political sympathies?
Worldwide legislation makes a transparent distinction between combatants and civilians, and the political opinions of the latter make no distinction. This, in fact, is one other side of the worldwide authorized regime that Israel intentionally ignores.
Two days earlier than Al-Jaafarawi’s assassination, an Israeli airstrike killed 4 municipal staff and a bystander in central Gaza Metropolis. The employees have been on their technique to restore water pipes to assist restore the water provide. Water infrastructure has been a frequent goal of the IOF, because the deprivation of this fundamental service has led to mass struggling and the unfold of illness amongst Palestinians, which in fact contributes to Israel’s genocidal plans.
Efforts by engineers and communications employees to interrupt via Israel’s Web blockade in Gaza have additionally resulted in repeated deaths. In January, an Israeli tank attacked a staff despatched to restore a generator at a switchboard in Khan Younis, killing two of them, despite the fact that that they had coordinated their actions and the duty that they had been given with Israeli occupation forces.
The Israeli army has additionally repeatedly attacked well being centres and their employees, killing or kidnapping a few of Gaza’s prime medical specialists and hospital directors. Based on the United Nations, 885 medical employees had been killed in Gaza by August.
Some have been attacked of their properties and others within the hospitals the place that they had stayed to deal with sufferers whereas Israeli forces carried out raids. Others have been tortured to dying, similar to Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, an orthopedic surgeon at Al-Shifa Hospital, and Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi, head of obstetrics and gynecology at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
The destruction of Gaza’s well being sector and the mass homicide of medical doctors and different well being professionals implies that Palestinians haven’t any entry to enough healthcare, whether or not they’re chronically sick, newly contaminated or injured by Israel’s relentless bombardment. This contributes as soon as once more to Israel’s genocide.
As many movies of the aftermath of airstrikes present, the wounded are sometimes rushed to under-resourced and dysfunctional medical services, the place they’re laid on the bottom in a pool of blood because the few obtainable medical employees rush to offer emergency care. A lot of those that would usually have been saved die.
Israel’s widespread destruction of all life-sustaining public companies in Gaza has introduced the Palestinian inhabitants to the brink of the abyss. A resident of the Khan Younis refugee camp just lately wrote to me: “[The Israelis] “They haven’t left a single sewage pipe, a single water pipe, a single desalination unit, no bakeries, no communication towers, no homes. They’ve razed greenhouses and bushes, they’ve bombed mosques and faculties. They’ve bombed the whole lot. Complete destruction. We’re all targets and nobody is secure. No physician, no college professor, no baby, no girl, no lawyer, no journalist and no place or facility – UN or every other – is secure. They inform us that we’ve to go away Gaza if we need to keep alive.”
Israel’s purpose in eliminating any semblance of civil order and repair supply is, in fact, to sow despair amongst Palestinians and stifle any impulse they might have to withstand occupation, subjugation and dispossession. However this technique is doomed to failure for 2 causes: as a result of it violates worldwide legislation and since it’s ineffective.
Israel has lengthy ignored and violated the worldwide authorized regime, however what it’s doing in Gaza proper now’s one thing that even its staunchest supporters can’t defend. In January, the Worldwide Court docket of Justice issued a preliminary ruling calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “plausibly” genocidal. In Might, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan requested the court docket to difficulty arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his protection minister, Yoav Gallant, for conflict crimes dedicated in Gaza.
In June, an unbiased UN inquiry concluded that Israel had dedicated crimes in opposition to humanity through the conflict. The UN Fee of Inquiry that performed the inquiry said in its report: “The immense variety of civilian casualties in Gaza and the widespread destruction of civilian property and infrastructure have been the inevitable results of a method adopted with the intention of inflicting most injury, disregarding the rules of distinction, proportionality and acceptable precautions.”
Whereas Israel is committing conflict crimes by destroying Gaza’s infrastructure and civilian companies and killing the individuals who preserve them, these actions won’t fulfill the long-term purpose: forcing Palestinians to capitulate and quit their proper to their homeland.
For 11 months, the strongest military within the area and one of the crucial superior on this planet has been unable to realize a army victory in opposition to an armed resistance group, except one counts the mass killing of civilians, principally girls and youngsters, and the full destruction of their livelihoods as a measure of success.
In a June article in Overseas Affairs journal, political scientist Robert A. Pape argued that Israel has in some ways “made its enemy stronger” than it was earlier than the Oct. 7 assaults as a result of it has made it extra standard and thus simpler at recruiting.
In a later interview, Pape argued that Israel’s technique of overwhelming air energy is failing, simply because it failed in Vietnam and Iraq. Overwhelming firepower tends to unite civilian populations in mutual solidarity in opposition to the enemy. That is what is going on in Gaza proper now.
Israel has been bombing indiscriminately to make Gaza uninhabitable and power Palestinians right into a mass exodus underneath the specter of mass dying. This has come at an unbelievable value to the folks of Gaza.
However Israel’s makes an attempt to destroy the social cloth of Palestinian society, erase its establishments and crush its spirit are in the end failing. It is because the folks of Gaza, supported by their international allies, are responding to this erasure with collective acts of defiance, attempting their finest to keep up public companies, well being and training, and their neighborhood life.
The current reopening of a small emergency unit at Al-Shifa Hospital is an instance of this enduring resilience. These efforts display not solely the braveness of Palestinian civil servants, but in addition the worldwide community of help and the immense mobilization of the Palestinian diaspora and its allies around the globe.
This defiance of insurance policies and acts of suppression is deeply rooted within the historical past of Palestinian resistance, expressed in each phrases and actions. The final time I spoke to my niece, Amal, shortly after she turned 18, I requested her what she wished for her birthday. She responded by reciting an excerpt from A Name to the Land, by the good Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, which displays the Palestinian spirit:
I ask for nothing greater than
die in my nation,
dissolve and merge with the grass,
give life to a flower
{that a} baby from my nation will select.
All I ask is to stay inside my nation,
as soil,
grass,
A flower.
The views expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
