An appeal to our medical colleagues in Gaza

The following is the text of an open letter addressed to physicians in Gaza. Dr. Cynthia Lazar and I wrote the letter and submitted it as an opinion piece to several daily periodicals in Canada and the United States. None of them accepted it for publication.

An open letter to our medical colleagues in Gaza:

As the one year anniversary of the war in Gaza approaches, we take stock of the tragic events unfolding and feel compelled to address the physicians of Gaza. As fellow medical doctors we have watched with great admiration and sympathy as you work under appalling conditions to care for the victims of the war that has been devastating Gaza for the past 11 months. Many of you, both permanent resident Palestinians and volunteers from abroad, have written eloquent accounts in medical journals and in the general media describing your patients’ plight and the desperate state of medical care in Gaza.

An important aspect of your responsibility to your patients’ welfare is to use your prominent social status as a platform to demand an end to the violence. However, we are disappointed that you almost invariably address your demands to end the war exclusively to Israel, one of the two parties to the conflict. We believe that you are misdirecting your demands, and in doing so you are squandering any influence you might have to relieve the suffering of the people of Gaza.

Ascribing agency to Israel and not to Hamas, the instigator of the conflict, may seem to be reasonable given the asymmetric nature of the war in Gaza. Israel has vastly superior military capability. Furthermore, Israel is ritually accused of the most heinous crimes against humanity including genocide, targeting of women and children, indiscriminate bombing, and using starvation as a strategy of warfare. All of these accusations have been meticulously disproven. Israel makes efforts to preserve civilian life that are unprecedented in the history of warfare. These include announcing its intended military targets and urging civilians to relocate to safe areas; facilitating the entry of food aid; and the recent successful project to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of Gazan children against a new strain of polio. Critics of Israel disregard these humanitarian actions, undertaken while conducting urban warfare against an enemy whose fighters are hiding beneath its unprotected civilian population.

Where Hamas’ war crimes are acknowledged, including the recent brutal execution of 6 innocent hostages, they are often excused as being justified in the struggle against “occupation”. The bodies of one of these murdered hostages weighed just 36kg, evidence of enforced starvation, a bitter irony when spurious claims that Israel had been starving the population of Gaza have been conclusively disproven. In another cynical inversion of reality, Israel is accused of an imaginary genocide, whereas its war aim is to degrade the ability of Hamas to carry out an actual genocide, as it has repeatedly promised to perpetrate if not deterred.

Hamas is the ruling authority of Gaza. They started this war and they can and should end it. It is to Hamas, which repeatedly rejects all reasonable ceasefire offers, that you should address your demands.

Hamas abdicates its responsibility to protect the citizens it governs, cynically declaring that it is not responsible for their protection. Worse, it deliberately puts its own citizens in harm’s way as a means of gaining international sympathy. Its senior leaders freely acknowledge that civilian deaths work to their advantage. Civilians are forbidden to shelter in the 700 km tunnel system built using funds diverted from international humanitarian aid, and reserved exclusively for the protection of Hamas fighters.

Hamas holds the key to an immediate end to all the suffering and death. If they were to lay down their arms and release all of the approximately 100 hostages they still hold, alive and dead, the war would end in an instant. Why then do they continue to fight a seemingly hopeless war, creating untold misery throughout Gaza and Israel, costing the lives of thousands of fighters? It seems that Hamas believes that by merely surviving, they are winning the war. Their psychological warfare, releasing videotape of the murdered hostages in their last moments, is demoralizing and dividing Israel.

The propaganda war, demonizing and delegitimizing Israel in the West, is proceeding as planned. To Hamas, the civilian deaths and physical destruction in Gaza are strategically essential, to isolate Israel and pressure it to withdraw from Gaza leaving Hamas diminished, but Yehya Sinwar alive and still in power. This will allow the terror army to reorganize, rearm, and resume its relentless attacks, with the ultimate goal of establishing a Middle Eastern caliphate uncontaminated by a Jewish state or by Jews. Survival to fight and to destroy another day, regardless of the cost to the people they purport to represent, is all they can hope for now. This was the outcome of their four previous conflicts with Israel.

It may be that most of you are appalled by the level of suffering you see in your hospitals and clinics every day but are too intimidated to accuse the responsible perpetrators, Hamas. And yet, some of you cannot be unaware that your hospitals hide military facilities for Hamas, or that the mortality figures claimed by Gaza health authorities are fraudulent. Some of you have even been proven to be Hamas operatives. At least one of you harbored kidnapped hostages in your own home.

Health care workers in Gaza are practicing in deplorable conditions. Your impassioned front line accounts are moving, and your experiences deserve to be told. But you do a disservice to your patients and the people of Gaza by misdirecting your angry demands to Israel, insisting that it lay down arms and leave Hamas intact to fight another day. Doing so makes you consciously or unconsciously complicit in prolonging the suffering and misery of all Gazans who live under the thumb of a barbarous terrorist regime.

Sincerely,

Jerome Teitel MD FRCPC, and Cynthia Lazar MD FRCPC