Film reveals Israel deliberately killing doctors and paramedics in Lebanon and Gaza under guise of attacking Hamas and Hezbollah
https://youtu.be/Pu1tOvNtRmU?si=Kj7dcd5lyd2BH-Lf
This week the International Court of Justice at The Hague begins a week long public hearing into whether Israel has broken international law in occupied Gaza through its brutal treatment of civilians, medics and aid workers and the Israeli ban on the United Nations aid organisation UNWRA.
Last week I attended a documentary film screening and discussion event organised by the media group Middle East Eye and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians. The documentary was a searing account of the life and death of paramedics and doctors trying to save lives as Israel bombed the Muslim quarter of Beirut and the villages of Southern Lebanon. The panelists included doctors and volunteers who had worked in Gaza, and an international law expert who made it clear that these attacks were against international law.
The film by Middle East Eye was made with the co-operation of Lebanese workers and an extremely brave woman reporter, Hind Hassan, who embedded herself with emergency ambulance teams going to the latest bombings in Southern Beirut and the surrounding villages at great risk to her own life.
The “double tap” killings
What she discovered was that the Israelis were using a particular brutal bombing technique known as the ” double tap”. First they bombed a building and followed what happened using drones. Then they came back and bombed again just at the moment when ambulances and paramedics arrived to try and rescue victims. The only intention of the second bombing was not to kill Hezbollah but to kill doctors and paramedics at the scene.
The film also showed that many paramedics and doctors slept in Beirut’s hospitals so they could be on call immediately a bomb dropped during the night. The Israeli’s bombed their sleeping quarters killing a number of them. You can watch the video of the film at the top of this article.
The Israeli’s claim the reason they bomb ambulances is that they are used by Hezbollah to transfer arms and missiles not to rescue people – even cartoons are used to illustrate this. The reporter saw no evidence of this when she was working with the ambulance teams and frankly it would odd to load up an ambulance going to a bombed out zone with weapons – they need the space to take back casualties.
The discussion that followed included first hand accounts from medics who had worked in Gaza including Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a renowned humanitarian plastic surgeon, who has worked in conflict zones and in Gaza. He has been banned by Israel from returning to the Gaza strip. Dr Victoria Rose, an NHS plastic surgeon and the chair of the UK’s Specialty Advisory Committee on Plastic Surgery Training, who volunteered to work in Gaza and Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch.
Some of the statistics that came out during the discussion were terrifying. All Gaza’s hospitals have either been damaged and destroyed, some 512 schools and 12 universities destroyed, 52,000 people killed and some 5,700 people who are now the lone survivor of once large families. The medics and paramedics have been decimated – there are only two pathologists left alive in Gaza and many teachers and journalists have been killed. if all that is not genocide, what is it? It also suggest that the recent killing of Gaza ambulancemen to be dumped in a mass grave is not some professional mistake but part of a strategy to degrade the country and make it uninhabitable.
As I often do on my blogs there is a full report of the panel discussion on Youtube which I have embedded here. It is over an hour long but it will give a proper flavour of the event.
https://youtu.be/6mfXOn_pw0o?si=_rUbxP5zsovnrbQj
Video of the panel discussion
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#Gaza #Israel #Lebanon #medics #warfare