Angy Skuce explains how Irish healthcare workers have been moved to action by the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
As I write this, Ireland is preparing for Storm Eowyn. I am thinking of my flight to Geneva, booked for Saturday morning, and hoping that I will make it there on time. I am a member of Irish HealthCare Workers for Palestine, and those of us who can, are going to Geneva to join healthcare workers from more than 100 organisations across the world, to stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza. The White Tents Action will bring healthcare workers from more than 100 organisations across the world, to UN headquarters in Geneva, in a 5 day event calling for an end to the healthicide and genocide in Gaza. We will ask the UN to enforce a permanent ceasefire, to establish and protect a humanitarian corridor that allows aid to flow in unimpeded and sick and injured people to be evacuated, to protect healthcare workers and their patients, and to hold individuals and states accountable for violations of international law.
Irish HealthCare Workers for Palestine is an informal group of more than 400 healthcare workers in Ireland. It has evolved from a small group of doctors working in Paediatrics and Inclusion Health, who in October 2023 saw children being killed and hospitals being attacked and who came together to advocate for the protection of children and healthcare in Gaza. Members now include people from all health and social care disciplines, from students to people long retired. We came from different beginnings and different perspectives, but we all realise now that there is only one outcome that will restore health to the people of Palestine – freedom from occupation.
We have learned about the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people were driven from their homes and their land, never to return. We have learned about life in Occupied Palestine, where women give birth on the road at an Israeli check-point, trying to get to a hospital, and where 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by inhabitants of illegal Israeli settlements.
We have learned about Israel’s history of killing Palestinian doctors – Dr Suleiman, a much respected friend of some Irish HCWs, and head of the Palestine Red Crescent Society Emergency Medical Services, who was shot and killed in Jenin in the West Bank on Mar. 4 2002. He was in an ambulance carrying an injured child when Israeli soldiers opened fire on it ‘because it was driving at speed’.
Dr Al-Khoudari, the director of a small hospital, died Mar. 8 the same year. He was shot dead by Israeli troops as he drove to a refugee camp near Bethlehem. Amnesty International (AI) said he had received permission from the local Israeli commander to pick up medical supplies at a hospital and was allowed to pass the first checkpoint. However, as he neared the camp an Israeli tank opened fire, killing him.
We have watched children being shot, and adults being shot as they tried to rescue them. We have watched our colleagues, grizzled surgeons who have spent years working in conflict zones and disaster areas, breaking down in tears as they describe what they witnessed in Gaza in the past year. A father, carrying his son in to the emergency dept – they had been walking down the road together, when the father felt his son’s hand ripped from his. He saw him lying face down in the dust 10m away, a bullet hole in his back, and then he saw a bullet hit him in the head. Still he carried his son to the hospital, and handed him into the care of the surgeon – who turned him over, and saw that all of the organs had been blown out of his chest. An Israeli sniper did that to a young child – and then shot him in the head.
We saw a young Canadian doctor describe a patient he saw in Gaza, who had a foot ulcer. This was a Palestinian doctor, who refused to leave his patients when the Israeli military ordered him to – so they forced him to strip naked, and stand for 2 days and 2 nights, defaecating and urinating where he stood; no food, no water, no insulin for his diabetes. After 2 days they allowed him to tend to his patients, who were all children – but they didn’t allow him to wash or dress first.
We saw Dr Hussam Abu Safiyah a Paediatrician and Medical Director of Kamal Adwan hospital, day after day, beg for help from the international community as his hospital was destroyed around him. We didn’t help, and we still aren’t helping him.
He has been abducted by the Israeli military, and in breach of international law he has been denied access to a lawyer, and the Red Cross are denied all access to Palestinian prisoners in Israel. This is a man who set up the first and only neonatal intensive care unit in northern Gaza, changing the lives of women with high-risk pregnancies and their babies. 3 months ago, the Israeli army attacked and laid siege to his hospital. They detained and interrogated all of the staff, then released Dr Abu Safiyah – but killed his beloved son Ibrahim. Dr Abu Safiyah received his own child’s body into the hospital, prayed for him, and then went back to work. In accordance with the Geneva Declaration, he stayed with his patients, doing his best, with grace and dignity, to care for them. Little food, few medical supplies, most of his staff abducted – still he stayed on.
On November 25th we got news that Dr Abu Safiyah had been injured. A quadcopter had flown into the hospital, and detonated a bomb in one of the wards. It sprayed tiny shards of metal everywhere – big and sharp enough to slice through human flesh, but small enough to be very difficult for a surgeon to find and remove – especially when there are lots of them and you have no x-ray or CT facilities because the Israeli military have blown them up, and the spare parts have been waiting at the border for 2 months and the Israeli border control won’t let them through. We held our breath, hoping that the Israelis would allow a surgical team from a hospital to the south to go to Kamal Adwan to treat him, or allow the World Health Organisation to send medical supplies including antibiotics in, so that he wouldn’t die from sepsis. While we waited, Dr Abu Safiyah got up from his hospital bed and hobbled around the wards on a crutch, dispensing reassurance and hope to the patients, holding his team together while they tried to provide care with no resources. The surgical team were not allowed in. The hospital was bombed while the WHO team were there. The oxygen supply was bombed again, the windows and doors were blown out so the cold winds and dust from rubble blew in. We saw photos of the view from the windows of Kamal Adwan hospital – rubble, burnt out buildings, armoured drones flying, huge crates of explosives marked ‘danger’ placed around the hospital. We looked out the windows of our own hospitals and saw green fields and misty rain and our cars waiting to take us home to family and comfort.
On December 27th, after 84 days of siege and attack, Dr Hussam Abu Safiyah was abducted by the Israeli army. He tried to negotiate with the attackers, to protect his patients – and the photograph of him walking through the rubble in his white coat towards a tank will stay with me for ever. The hospital was ordered to evacuate all staff and patients, and then set on fire. There are eyewitness reports of him having been stripped to his underwear in freezing temperatures that have resulted in the deaths of 7 newborn babies; of him being beaten with a wire, of him being seen in the infamous Sde Teinem prison in Israel, bloodied and bruised – but in breach of the Geneva convention, no-one really knows where he is. His family , who are already mourning the death of his son, are now terrified that the same fate awaits him as was suffered by Dr Adnan Al Bursh. Dr Al Bursh was an orthopaedic surgeon from Gaza, who was abducted and illegally detained by the Israeli military, and who died as a result of torture while in detention. Israel tortured Dr Al Bursh to death; as they did Dr Ziad Eldalou; and Dr Iyad Al-Rantisi.
We heard the voice of little Hind Rajab, phoning from a car surrounded by her dead family, as she spoke with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society dispatcher. We saw the photos of the car, destroyed by 335 rounds of ammunition from an Israeli tank. We saw the ambulance which had been promised safe passage by Israel, to go and rescue Hind, destroyed by the Israeli military and containing the dead bodies of the paramedics Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madoun. Hind’s body lay in the car for 12 days.
Israel has killed more than 1,000 healthcare workers in Gaza in the past 15 months, and abducted hundreds more. Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the ambulances, most of the Primary Care Centres in Gaza. Without health there is no hope, there is no future.
We are healthcare workers, and we believe in the right to health of all people. So does our government, and so do all of our professional bodies – or so they say. What are they doing to protect the health of the people of Palestine? What are they doing to ensure that international law is upheld?
We, the members of IHCW4P, act from the heart. We speak with many voices, as one. We are an entirely democratic, informal organisation, united by a common cause. We hold vigils and actions and marches. We mount email and phone campaigns and sign petitions. We join with other groups – mothers, artists, farmers, teachers. Someone has an idea, and we all support it in whatever way we can. I’m good with a megaphone, others are good with strategy, some brilliant at Social Media.
We go together to our professional bodies, saying to them ‘It is not partisan to call for an end to the slaughter of thousands of children – it is our ethical duty. It is not political to say that Israel must stop destroying hospitals – it is the law’.
We need to do this together, to shout that the Emperor is naked. Alone it is hard to keep believing that you can make a difference. Together we are strong.
It is not easy to do this – but it is necessary. We stood outside the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis at 8:45am last Sunday, calling for the Occupied Teritories Bill to be passed. A passer-by shouted ‘Have you nothing better to be doing?’.
No, I do not. I am a doctor. I believe in Justice, Autonomy, Doing Good, Not Doing Harm – for all people. Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world for children, the most dangerous place in the world for healthcare workers. I will keep shouting Stop! Until they do.
