Responding to a war crime with a worse war crime
When a top British surgeon discovered a 6-year-old Palestinian boy wrapped in a blanket, shivering semiconsciously, lying on hospital grounds in Gaza, he scooped him up and rushed him into a corner where he and other colleagues worked on their hands and knees to resuscitate him.
There was no bed and all they could do was cover his burns and put a drip into him to drain the bleeding in his chest. It is not known whether the child survived.
In an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph, UK-based surgeon Professor Nick Maynard described the child’s injuries as “the single worst thing” he had seen in 35 years of medical practice.
The child had a head injury, his body was covered with “appalling burns” and his chest was “torn open by a shrapnel wound”.
An experienced gastrointestinal consultant surgeon at Oxford University Hospital, Maynard has been going to Gaza for nearly 15 years to teach the staff how to operate. He described his latest trip to Gaza as “beyond the worst thing“he’d seen.
His visit was unexpectedly cut short when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate Al-Aqsa Hospital in early January.
Al-Aqsa is not the only hospital in Gaza that has come under Israeli attack. The 700-bed Al-Shifa hospital has been left in total ruins after two weeks of Israeli raids.
In an interview with London-based LBC radio about the recent Al-Shifa attacks, Maynard said, “there is no doubt at all that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days”.
He called Israeli evidence of Hamas activity in Al-Shifa “not remotely credible”.
Maynard said he recognised the photograph of the Hamas tunnel shown by Israel back in early November as a ventilation shaft next to a Gaza City hotel he had stayed in.
Israel has reportedly killed hundreds of medical staff, journalists, aid workers, and more than 13,000 Palestinian children.
It blames Hamas for using civilians as human shields, but the sheer scale of the killings, 33,000 so far, together with the killing of three Israeli hostages, shirtless and carrying a white flag, and World Central Kitchen’s aid workers, whose every movement was coordinated with the IDF, has given the lie to Israel’s human shield narrative.
We are made to believe that the rescue of Israeli hostages is the key goal of the war in Gaza. But of the 240 Israeli hostages, only three have been rescued by direct military operations in six months. Four were released unilaterally by Hamas and 105 were released through negotiations.
It is not clear how many Israeli hostages remain alive. Hamas has said 50 were killed during Israeli air raids.
By now, it should be clear that the war in Gaza, which has killed just as many Israeli captives as it has rescued, is neither about the hostages, nor about eliminating Hamas.
Support for Hamas, among Palestinians and in the wider region, has increased. It’s not hard to imagine that today’s new generation of Gazan orphans will be tomorrow’s Hamas fighters.
The government of Israel is hellbent on collective punishment of Palestinians, with full military and diplomatic support from the US.
It is reported that the British government has received advice from its own lawyers stating that Israel has breached international law in Gaza. Starvation in Gaza is likely to be “key to UK legal advice on war crimes”.
Sadly, our new coalition Government, following the United States’ lead, is doing little in response to unspeakable atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. Less than a month after the Russian invasion, the New Zealand government introduced the Russia Sanctions Act 2022 and rightly made available a twoyear temporary visa for Ukrainians with family in New Zealand. The government recently announced Ukrainian Special Visa holders can now apply for residency.
There are around 288 Palestinians resident in New Zealand. How are they supposed to feel when their call on the Government to create a special category visa for their families trapped in Gaza is ignored?
We cannot turn our backs on human suffering of this scale. We must do more.
That shivering 6-year-old Palestinian boy, lying alone on hospital grounds, deserved better. All children deserve peace.
The events of October 7 were undoubtedly war crimes. But it is wrong to respond to a war crime by committing war crimes of a greater magnitude. The world has called for a ceasefire through a UN resolution. Israel has responded to the resolution by killing even more Palestinians.
For the sake of all trapped Gazans, the majority of whom are women and children, and for the sake of Israeli hostages, whose lives the bombings also threaten, New Zealand needs to use its voice in a more direct and effective way to help bring this bloodshed to an end. Enough is enough.