"Medicide:" Israel-US are Carrying Out a War on Hospitals as Part of Their Holocaust and Depopulation Plan in Gaza and Lebanon
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From [HERE] In early October, Shoshan Hassan Mazraani, the head emergency department nurse at the Marjayoun hospital in southern Lebanon, was drinking coffee at work when she saw an Israeli strike hit without warning “directly on the ambulances” outside. The attack killed seven paramedics and wounded five others. The same day, Israeli strikes repeatedly hit Salah Ghandour Hospital in the nearby town of Bint Jbeil. In that assault, nine hospital workers were injured, several critically.
“The hospital was struck three times,” the facility’s director, a physician named Moanes Kalakish said later. “One shell struck the on-call room and two shells struck the paramedics’ waiting room, [both] inside the hospital.”
In the weeks since, Israeli attacks have struck medical systems across Lebanon, hitting hospitals, ambulances, and clinics as part of an aerial assault and invasion that has now killed more than 3,000 people, including over 150 health care and rescue workers, in the past twelve months.
Two reports issued recently, one from Human Rights Watch (HRW) and another from CNN, detail the pattern of attacks on the Lebanese health care system. HRW, in its report, concluded that the Israeli strikes on the Marjayoun and Salah Ghandour hospitals, along with another separate strike on a rescue center in Beirut, all constitute likely war crimes. In total, HRW reported that Israeli attacks across Lebanon have hit a total of 158 ambulances and fifty-five hospitals. In a separate analysis, CNN found that in just the first month of the escalating offensive in Lebanon, Israeli strikes hit thirty-four hospitals and 107 ambulances, killing 111 emergency medical technicians.
The Israeli assault on health care in Lebanon is increasingly widespread, affecting the delivery of care throughout the country. In one single twenty-four-hour period in October, Israeli forces killed more than twenty-eight on-duty medics nationwide, forcing thirty-seven health care facilities to shut down and three hospitals in Beirut to evacuate. Nearly half of the country’s primary care centers have now been forced to close, and, according to CNN’s investigation, around 20 percent of all the hospitals nationwide have been damaged by Israeli strikes in the course of just a single month.
In the words of Imran Riza, the United Nations (UN) deputy humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, the devastation has left the health system “on the brink of collapsing.” The World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Lebanon, Abdinasir Abubakar, assessed that “it’s just a matter of time until the system actually reaches its limit.”
The specter of the American-backed genocide in Gaza looms large over this unfolding violence, as Israeli leaders have made clear that the devastation in occupied Palestine should be understood as a threat to civilians in Lebanon. At the outset of the invasion, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.” “What we are doing in Gaza, we can do in Beirut,” the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said last November. Israeli forces, in his words, could “copy and paste” their methods.
Those methods developed in Gaza include deliberate and systematic violence against the medical system and health more broadly. In Gaza, Israeli forces have killed around a thousand Palestinian health care workers and bombed nearly every single hospital. An independent UN commission concluded in October that Israel “has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza” and “deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles,” constituting multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the crime of extermination. In July, a group of eleven independent UN special rapporteurs and experts found that Israel was engaged in an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people,” amounting to “a form of genocidal violence.” These efforts have been so total and so transparently deliberate that they have been described variously as a “War on Hospitals,” a “War on Health,” and an “Epidemiological War,” eventually demanding the invention of a new term to describe the carnage: medicide.
