1,500 Israeli medical professionals call for immediate release of all the hostages
The Lancet, which is published in the UK and is one of the world’s leading general medical journals, has printed an urgent call signed by 1,500 Israeli senior physicians and other medical professionals for the immediate release by Hamas of the nearly 200 hostages in Gaza. The journal published it two days after they were taken hostage.
The lead authors of the correspondence were Prof. Shani Paluch-Shimon, director of breast oncology; and Prof. Aron Popovtzer, head of the oncology department and the Sharett Institute of Oncology at the Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem; and Dr. Raya Leibowitz, a clinician-investigator and a practicing medical oncologist at Shamir Medical Center in Tzrifin.
“The past few days have been harrowing for Israel,” the authors wrote. “We are in shock at the greatest loss of civilian life since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Civilians – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – were massacred on a scale that is incomprehensible, in a calculated act of terror. Jewish families have been massacred in their homes, foreign agriculture workers have been slaughtered in the fields, hundreds of young people [at] a party were shot in the back while escaping, and Bedouin children have been shot dead by Hamas militia. More than 3,000 rockets hit Israel on Oct 7 alone, leading to an almost complete halt of normalcy and routine across many parts of the country.”
The “barbaric rampage was indiscriminate,” they wrote. “Entire villages in the South of Israel have been decimated. Entire families were lost. This was the largest pogrom in one day against Jewish people since the Holocaust. It is a crime against humanity.”
Israeli hospitals are on full alert, and all physicians and medical personnel have been called upon, they wrote. The healthcare system has always been and will continue to be a model of co-existence for all – Jews, Muslims, Druze, and Christians – people of all faiths and ethnicities working together, caring for all human beings regardless of their nationality, identity, gender, religion, or political belief, the authors wrote.
“This is our oath,” they wrote. “These are our values… Videos have emerged of bodies being mutilated on the streets of Gaza, of hostages paraded, humiliated, beaten in front of cheering crowds, of hostages tied and bound in abhorrent conditions, of Israeli children being hit by both Gazan adults and children.”
The signatories urgently called on “the international medical community committed to the preservation of human life to condemn the savage massacre, to immediately call for guarantees for the safety and health of all those being kept hostage, and to unequivocally call for the immediate and unconditional return of our families and friends who have been cruelly taken hostage.”