Joelle M. Abi-Rached in Boston Review:
The face of the ongoing onslaught on Gaza has no doubt been Dr. Hammam Alloh, the thirty-six-year-old Palestinian nephrologist at northern Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate it when it was invaded by Israeli troops. “And if I go, who treats my patients?” he said in an October 31 interview. “We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare,” he added. Two weeks later, Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his father, brother-in-law, and father-in-law.
Alloh’s use of the word “animals” was certainly not lost on viewers. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had used that same language on October 9 when he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, labeling its residents as “human animals.” Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.
More here.