According to the United Nations (OCHA), 24 hospitals in Gaza are now out of service, and 493 health workers have been killed. Each medical centre or humanitarian delivery system has been or is being destroyed, to be replaced by less effective, improvised options. There is no telling what the indirect human cost in deaths and long-term injuries will be as a result of aid and treatment having been denied.
Staff and patients from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have had to leave 12 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents—an average of 3.7 per month on average—which includes airstrikes damaging hospitals, tanks being fired at agreed deconflicted shelters, ground offensives into medical centres, and convoys fired upon. MSF has yet to receive accountability or any admission of responsibility for the killings, maiming, or the dehumanisation of our staff and patients.
While the past seven months have been devastating for communities in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and in Israel, from a medical humanitarian perspective, the violence faced by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank far pre-date 7 October. It is important to recall that there was already a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip, caused by Israel’s 16-year blockade of the enclave.
On 6 October 2023, MSF was running medical humanitarian activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, specifically in Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, Masafer Yatta, and the Gaza Strip. On that day, our colleagues were tending to patients in Gaza wounded by so-called butterfly bullets, fired by Israeli snipers at people as they protested in the days and weeks prior to the war that engulfed the region on 7 October. We were also treating 87 patients for long-term injuries (down from an original patient cohort of almost 900), sustained in the Great March of Return escalation in 2018 and 2019.
MSF medical staff were also continuing to treat patients wounded in the war of 2021, sparked by the seizure and settlement of property in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, and resulting in the gravest escalation since 2014 with thousands of Palestinians displaced, massive levels of destruction, and hundreds killed.