Our Colleagues in Gaza are Being Killed, and the Medical Establishment in Israel is Silent
By Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha
Haaretz, April 7, 2025
Last Sunday (March 30), a UN rescue team arrived to locate the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in Gaza, after they disappeared for the Tel A-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah a week earlier. According to reports, they arrived at the site in coordination with the Israeli military, and a military official told them to “come with digging tools”. And indeed, they dug. Inside the piles of sand they found the 15 dead, some of them still wearing gloves, some of them with their hands or feet bound, some of them were shot dozens of times in their upper body. They were found dead in a killing pit, together with an ambulance and a UN vehicle that were also found buried in the sand.
The army has since denied and retracted the accusations, and now it’s investigating. It turned out that the claim that the vehicles “were driving without coordination and without emergency lights” was false, after a video was released that proved that the flashing lights were on. And yet, in Israel, the story did not receive much attention. How can we move on from here?
Since the war began, the health system in Gaza has been a constant target of deliberate attacks by the Israeli army. According to data from the UN and aid organizations in Gaza, 19 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been rendered nonfunctional out of 36 hospitals that operated there prior to the war. The rest are operating only partially. More than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed during the war, and more than 300 have been arrested and tortured in Israeli detention facilities. On the night between March 17 and 18, Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis was bombed for the umpteenth time. In one night, hundreds of children, women, sick and wounded were killed there – clear war crimes.
The claim that comes up again and again, when mentioning the catastrophe that the Israeli army is wreaking on the health system in Gaza, is that the hospitals are being used as Hamas military bases. To this, it must be said: first, the army has never provided convincing testimony and evidence for this claim. Second, even if this is true, let’s assume that there are a hundred terrorists holding hostages inside Sheba Medical Center. Would it have occurred to anyone to bomb the hospital with their staff, patients and families? And finally, we must also remember that the IDF HQ, the main enlisting base (Bakum), the central southern command, Tzrifin and quite a few other Israeli military bases sit right in the heart of civilian populations.
But what breaks my heart more than anything is the deafening silence of the medical establishment in Israel. As a doctor, I was always taught to sanctify human life and do everything to save lives. I was taught that the medical profession does not distinguish between colors, languages, sex, gender, or political preference. It is supposed to be a bubble of co-existence. However, it turns out that it is unable to cry out against crimes committed against its own. A bubble yes, but co-existence less so.
Our colleagues in Gaza are being killed en masse. People who, like us, swore to save lives and treat everyone who needs help, risk their lives to uphold that oath, and are ultimately thrown into a pit – and we remain silent? How can we educate generations of doctors to see every human as human, and turn a blind eye to what is happening only a few dozen kilometers from the medical schools?
This war is a mark of disgrace for decades to come. The killing of paramedics is just one story among many that illustrate the moral and ethical lows to which Israeli society has reached. We must oppose the war. We must stop it.