These days the word tsi iakehnheiontahiontáhkhwa haunts me. It comes to me from Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who recently received the Grand Prix from the Conseil des arts de Montréal for her documentary Kanatenhs: When the Pine Needles Fallabout women’s resistance during the siege of Kanehsatà:ke in 1990. Activist and artist Kanien’kehá:ka explains that in the Mohawk language, the word corresponding to “hospital”, tsi iakehnheiontahiontáhkhwaliterally means “the place where people go to die” because “there was a time when Aboriginal people only went to the hospital to die”.
If this word haunts me these days, it is in the context of a completely different colonial siege: the one imposed on Gaza by Israel. The blockade and attacks on health infrastructure and personnel mean that Palestinian caregivers, despite their ingenuity and courage, are incapable of providing the necessary care to the population. Hospitalized patients, including children, and people trying to seek refuge were killed in attacks targeting hospitals. In Gaza, where no place is safe, hospitals have become “a place where people go to die”.
The death toll climbs after each attack by the Israeli army on a hospital. On April 6, the World Health Organization reported that al-Chifa Hospital “is now nothing more than an empty shell.” Mass graves discovered in and around the critical al-Nasser and al-Chifa hospitals prompted the UN to call for an investigation this week. Some of the bodies were found with their hands tied, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
The World Health Organization confirms that only 10 hospitals remain barely functional, out of the 36 main ones that served more than 2 million Gazans, leaving them “completely deprived of the fundamental right” to health. According to The Nation“Israel has created a medical apocalypse in Gaza.”
Medical lawfare, or how to justify the unjustifiable
The Israeli government alleges that the targeted Palestinian medical facilities were used for military purposes, a justification allowing it to exploit an exception in international humanitarian law, which considers units, means of transport and health personnel to be protected during armed conflicts.
In a chapter on attacks on health care in his recent book How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health, Professor Yara M. Asi explains that other governments have used similar arguments. For example, during the American attack on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, during Saudi bombings in Yemen or during Russian strikes in Ukraine, etc. According to her, the justifications may differ, but the results are the same: “poor health among the population and the weakening of communities”.
In a text published this month in the journal Journal of Palestine Studiesprofessors Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon propose the term “ medical lawfare ” to describe “the strategy adopted by the Israeli army and government to legitimize attacks on survival and life support infrastructure [en Palestine], or the blaming of these attacks on the Palestinians themselves.” The analysis focuses mainly on the series of military aggressions launched since the imposition of the blockade on Gaza in 2007, although the authors also address the “genocidal forms of violent reprisals” deployed by the Israeli army – always examined at the International Court of Justice — “following the massacres in Israel committed by Hamas and other Palestinian factions” on October 7.
They explain that the justifications given by Israel for attacking medical infrastructure in Gaza in 2008-2009 (after the fact) and in 2014 (before the fact) could not be verified by UN authorities in detailed reports. . For his part, the secretary general of Doctors Without Borders has already questioned the basis for this kind of justification for current attacks in Gaza: “We have not seen any independently verified evidence of such use. »
Perugini and Gordon’s analysis juxtaposes the cumulative effects of what they call “eruptive violence” — attacks on Gaza’s health infrastructure by Israel on five occasions since 2007 — and “structural violence,” which destroys the health of the population in a “prolonged, progressive and less viscerally alarming manner”. According to the authors, these two types of violence weaken the health infrastructure in Gaza, ultimately harming the maintenance of the “social body”.
The co-authors come to the conclusion that by “justifying these attacks which make the lives of Palestinians unbearable in Gaza, the medical lawfare Israeli becomes a tool of dispossession and colonial erasure […] which reproduces the key myth of the Nakba, according to which the Palestinians are responsible for the destruction that Israel causes. In this regard, they remind us of the words of the minister and member of the Israeli security cabinet who declared in November: “We are in the process of putting in place the Nakba from Gaza. »
Humanity with variable geometry
On the day the Israeli army ended its second siege of al-Chifa hospital, it targeted a multi-vehicle aid convoy from World Central Kitchen (WCK), killing seven workers, mostly foreigners, who were added to the 200 other humanitarian workers killed in Gaza in recent months. Israel was forced to admit to having made a series of “serious errors.” Yet despite the horrific accounts of violence against patients and medical staff during the al-Shifa hospital siege, neither political outrage nor Western media coverage has been on the same scale as for the lamentable deaths of WCK workers.
How can we explain this variable geometry indignation where one Western life is worth more than tens, even thousands, of Palestinian lives? According to the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, anti-Palestinian racism is “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” Denying the humanity of Palestinians allows us to ignore or justify the deaths of tens of thousands of them and even to blame them for their own suffering.
Earlier this month, during a heartbreaking interview on Radio-Canada, Sandy Leclerc, the spouse of the late Jacob Flickinger, Quebec victim of the attack on WCK, described the carnage inflicted in Palestine by Israel as being, precisely, a “war against humanity”. The secretary general of Doctors Without Borders described the attacks on health care as “attacks on humanity” in February.
It is indeed inhumane that humanitarian workers and caregivers are targeted and that hospitals have become “places where people go to die”. The Palestinian health system must be a place that cares for the body and soul of Palestinians with dignity in order to play its role — as in any society — of keeping the “social body” alive and healthy.