Israel orders patients, staff to ‘evacuate’ last two hospitals in northern Gaza siege – NZ healthcare solidarity protest
David Robie also blogs at Café Pacific
From my Asia Pacific Report:
Israel is forcing two hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate under threat of attack as its ethnic cleansing campaign continues.
Israeli forces have surrounded the Indonesian Hospital, where many staff and patients sought shelter after nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was destroyed in an Israeli raid last week, reports Al Jazeera.
Late on Friday, a forced order to evacuate was also issued for the al-Awda Hospital, where 100 people are believed to be sheltering.
- READ MORE: ‘Suspend Israel ties’ plea to global medical professionals – Auckland hospital protest vigil over Gaza
- What lies behind Israel’s war on Gaza hospitals?
- Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports
The evacuation order came today as New Zealand Palestine solidarity protesters followed a silent vigil outside Auckland Hospital yesterday with a rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today, where doctors and other professional health staff called for support for Gaza’s besieged health facilities and protection for medical workers.
When New Zealand youth health professional Michael Brenndorfer recalled the first time that the Israel military bombed and destroyed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in November 2023, the world was “ready to accept the the lies that Israel told then”.
“Of course, they wouldn’t bomb a hospital, who would bomb a hospital? That’s a horrible war crime, if must have been Hamas that bombed themselves.
“And the world let Israel get away with it. That’s the time that we knew if the world let Israel get away with it once, they would repeat it again and again and we would allow a dangerous precedent to be set where health care workers and health care centres would become targets over and over again.
“In the past year it is exactly what we have seen,” he said to cries of shame.
“We have seen not only the targeting of health care infrastructure, but the targeting of healthcare workers.
“The murdering of healthcare workers, of aid workers all across Gaza at the hands of Israel — openly without any word of opposition from our government, without a word of opposition from any global government about these war crimes and genocidal actions until today.”
In an impassioned speech about the devastating price that Gazans were paying for the Israeli war, New Zealand Palestinian doctor and Gaza survivor Dr Abdallah Gouda vowed that his people would keep their dream for an independent state of Palestine and “we will never leave Gaza”.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation into the Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals and medical workers.
Volker Türk told the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East that Israeli claims of Hamas launching attacks from hospitals in Gaza were often “vague” and sometimes “contradicted by publicly available information”.
Palestine urges UN to end Gaza genocide, ‘Israeli impunity’
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, said: “It is our collective responsibility to bring this hell to an end. It is our collective responsibility to bring this genocide to an end.”
The UNSC meeting on the Middle East came following last week’s raid on the Kamal Adwan Hospital and the arbitrary arrest and detention of its director, Hussam Abu Safia.
“You have an obligation to save lives”, Mansour told the council.
“Palestinian doctors and medical personnel took that mission to heart at the peril of their lives. They did not abandon the victims.
“Do not abandon them. End Israeli impunity. End the genocide. End this aggression immediately and unconditionally, now.”
Palestinian doctors and medical personnel were fighting to save human lives and losing their own while hospitals are under attack, he added.
“They are fighting a battle they cannot win, and yet they are unwilling to surrender and to betray the oath they took,” he said.
Urgent action is needed to restore North Gaza’s hospitals and uphold international humanitarian law.
Protecting healthcare saves lives.
We share WHOs concern at #UNSCHealth workers, patients, and hospitals are not lawful targets. https://t.co/VWswcGhCex
— Norway MFA (@NorwayMFA) January 3, 2025
Norway is the latest country to condemn the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers.
On X, the country’s Foreign Ministry said that “urgent action” was needed to restore north Gaza’s hospitals, which were continuously subjected to Israeli attack.
Without naming Israel, the ministry said that “health workers, patients and hospitals are not lawful targets”.
Israel ‘deprives 40,000’ of healthcare in northern Gaza
The Israeli military is systematically destroying hospitals in northern Gaza, the Gaza Government Media Office said.
In a statement, it said: “The Israeli occupation continues its heinous crimes and arbitrary aggression against hospitals and medical teams in northern Gaza, reflecting a dangerous and deliberate escalation.”
These acts, it added, were being carried out amid “unjustified silence of the international community and the UN Security Council”, violating international humanitarian law and human rights conventions.
The statement highlighted the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, where its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, was arrested and reportedly subjected to physical and psychological abuse.
The GMO described these acts as “full-fledged war crimes”.
According to a recent report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military had conducted more than 136 air raids on at least 27 hospitals and 12 medical facilities across Gaza in the past eight months.
The GMO report demanded an independent international investigation into these violations and accountability for Israel in international courts.
Amnesty International criticises detention of Kamal Adwan doctor
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog Amnesty International, said Israel’s detention of Dr Hussam Abu Safia underscored a pattern of “genocidal intent and genocidal acts” by Israel in Gaza.
“Dr Abu Safia’s unlawful detention is emblematic of the broader attacks on the healthcare sector in Gaza and Israel’s attempts to annihilate it,” Callamard said in a social media post.
“None of the medical staff abducted by Israeli forces since November 2023 from Gaza during raids on hospitals and clinics has been charged or put before a trial; those released after enduring unimaginable torture were never charged and did not stand trial.
“Those still detained remain held without charges or trial under inhumane conditions and at risk of torture,” she added.
I am constantly surprised by the number of people who continue to think Israel is good and Hamas is bad across all of society. So many people seem to have lost the ability to examine all the evidence which is made worse by social media continuing to provide them more of what they are watching so they say “I have done my own research” yet they continue to support evil.
The government should have expelled the Israeli ambassador months ago.
How do we know that ‘all the evidence’ is in fact all the evidence? Who determines this seemingly rudimentary but nonetheless extremely important detail! This is one reason why, doing your own research, is an important habit to master, because all too often, the evidence, the information provided (in any given news piece) barely scratches the surface of the issue at hand. In fact, most times, information can either be left out or misconstrued, but most of us are none the wiser to this, unless we actually do our own research! And social media is merely one avenue of information available to us all, that helps create understanding. Those that wish to keep us in the realm of following official news sources only, detest social media and DIY research, and yet at the same time, it is our officialdom, coupled with their mainstream media echo chambers, that turns a blind eye to genocide!
Your surprise here just shows how all-encompassing official news sources and officialdom is within NZ, if not the entire world. The DIY brigade and all the avenues of information that supports this process, are an anathema to officialdom. Be careful not to fall for the ‘official line’ on DIY people, like myself, given what Govt is doing or not going in regards to the worse atrocity of our lifetime!
Our government is much the same as Israel as they are intent on destroying our health and education system asap .They think our health and education industries are terrorist run groups so they will defund them and sell them to the corporate terror groups .
Kind of right. They can’t destroy health and education in a heartbeat because the fall out to this will be too great, thus neoliberalism, the policy behind this drive to privatization, will be kicked to the curb for good. But they can and are doing it incrementally so that we barely notice. Sure, we get upset at times, but it is never enough to upset their apple cart. Incrementalism, its a bastard process that we all need to be taking greater notice of.
Bg, Im right, Gaby
Read all of the have you, you truly understand the issues around it all,
A very short history of the Israel Palestine Conflict – Ilane Pappe (Jewish)
Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic, Ilane Pappe (Jewish)
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine – Ilane Pappe (Jewish)
The forgotten Palestinians – A history of the Palestinians in Israel – Ilane Pappe (Jewish)
The biggest prison on earth – Ilane Pappe (Jewish)
On Palestine – Noam Chomsky (Jewish)
The Invention of the land of Israel – Shlomo Sand (Jewish)
My Israel Question – Antony Lowenstein (Jewish)
The Palestine Laboratory – Antony Loewenstein (Jewish)
Israel a Beachhead in the middle east – Stephen Gowans
The Last Earth – Ramzy Baroud (Palestinian)
The making of Hamas’s foreign policy – Daud Abdullah (former Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain)
The Great War for Civilisation – Robert Fisk (deceased, middle East journalist)
The Question of Palestine – Edward Said (Palestinian)
Palestine a four thousand year history – Nurma Masalha (Palestinian)
Freedom Next Time – Resisting the empire – John Pilger (deceased, journalist, written many books and docos).
You know the constant ‘get out of jail free card’ that the Zionists use, we were persecuted so now we will persecute you and we can do that without fear of the Western governments having a go at us because you know we will call this anti-semitism. And we are really really afraid of having that thrown at us.
Meanwhile we have Deborah Hart harping on about Jews being targetted in Aotearoa when everyone knows that it is Moslems who are constantly being disenfranchised – because they are all terrorists.
Not one Israeli was murdered in the mosque but 3 Palestinians were!
Of course if you don’t know that Israel funded Hamas then you are really really ignorant.
In a controversial deal, Israel’s government under Benjamin Netanyahu supported Qatar’s payments to Hamas for many years, in the hope that it would turn Hamas into an effective counterweight to the Palestinian Authority and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
An important issue professionally reported but nowhere to be found in our media – why – because, as the placard says; our media is captive to Zionism just as it was captive to Apartheid, only this, involving a bloody genocide being perpetrated in real time, is far worse. Shame on our media, shame on our reporters, so-called journalists, opinion writers and cartoonists.