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hospitals
The US Must Stop Arming Israel’s Assault on Hospitals
If we can't find the morality to stop, we may find we have created a world in which no one can count on upholding basic human rights.
Feb 21, 2024
Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book.
Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion, or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of War of the Worlds or some other sci-fi fantasy.
Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed, and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone-launched laser-guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, healthcare workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.
At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on Earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.
Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as 12 additional surgeries. Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives.
He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed healthcare workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza, so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”
According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped 40 to 45 doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three healthcare professional organizations have issued a statement expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”
Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”
The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate New York who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming, “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”
In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors, and then he stopped. “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”
Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.
From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”
At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on Earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch. Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7, cannot—even if believed—justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.
The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisers make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality, and human dignity.
What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.
If we can't find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.
A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.
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Experts Call on ICC to 'Prosecute Israelis Responsible for Bombing Hospitals'
"There is a particularly cruel circular logic at play here: Israeli forces, as they bomb and besiege Gaza, are creating an urgent need for medical care among civilians while simultaneously denying them access to it."
Feb 09, 2024
A pair of human rights experts on Friday urged the International Criminal Court to prosecute any Israelis who have played a part in the assault on Gaza's healthcare system, which is in tatters after months of relentless airstrikes, shelling, and a suffocating blockade.
"Since Hamas' horrific October 7 attack, Israel has repeatedly targeted healthcare facilities, ambulances, and access roads," Annie Sparrow, a practicing clinician in war zones, and Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in an op-ed for Foreign Policy.
"It has arrested healthcare workers, blockaded fuel needed for generators, and withheld critical medical and surgical supplies—all of which are intended to undermine Gaza's healthcare system," they added. "There is a particularly cruel circular logic at play here: Israeli forces, as they bomb and besiege Gaza, are creating an urgent need for medical care among civilians while simultaneously denying them access to it."
Sparrow and Roth called on the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently investigating alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, to "prosecute Israelis responsible for bombing hospitals, denying access to medicines and vaccines, and causing excessive civilian harm."
"These attacks could be part of a plan to make Gaza uninhabitable and drive Palestinians out, an outcome that senior Israeli ministers—whose support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to remain in power—continue to promote," they wrote.
The near-total collapse of Gaza's healthcare system under Israel's assault, combined with the scarcity of clean water and other necessities, has left millions of Gazans at growing risk of disease. There is no longer a single fully functional hospital in the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations.
"Israel's destruction of Gaza's healthcare system is not only an important part of the genocide charges [brought by South Africa]—it is also a blatant war crime that should be prosecuted outright by the International Criminal Court," Sparrow and Roth wrote Friday, noting that while the International Court of Justice "resolves disputes between states, the ICC adjudicates criminal prosecutions of individuals."
"Targeting healthcare achieves little militarily while amplifying the death toll and suffering caused by indiscriminate bombardment," the pair continued. "Such attacks flout the core purpose of international humanitarian law—to relieve civilian suffering—and are thus often an omen of broader atrocities to come."
The World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday that it has documented more than 350 attacks on healthcare in the Gaza Strip since October 7. The attacks killed at least 645 people and injured 818 more, according to newly released WHO data.
"These attacks have affected 98 healthcare facilities, including 27 hospitals damaged out of 36, and affected 90 ambulances, including 50 which sustained damage," WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in Geneva.
The WHO's new figures came shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Israel's military to craft a plan to forcibly "evacuate" civilians from Rafah, a densely crowded city whose hospitals are overwhelmed with injured patients and displaced people.
Netanyahu's order intensified concerns that an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah is imminent.
Catherine Russell, head of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), warned that a Rafah assault could be catastrophic for the enclave's already starving and desperate population.
"We need Gaza's last remaining hospitals, shelters, markets, and water systems to stay functional," Russell told The Associated Press. "Without them, hunger and disease will skyrocket, taking more child lives.”
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Infections and Falls More Likely at Private Equity-Owned Hospitals: Study
Patients at hospitals acquired by private equity firms saw a 25% increase in adverse events, new research shows.
Dec 27, 2023
A study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients are more likely to fall or suffer infections at hospitals owned by private equity firms, whose role in the U.S. healthcare system has grown exponentially in recent years.
The study uses Medicare claims data from between 2009 and 2019 to compare patient complications at private equity-acquired hospitals and control facilities not owned by private equity. Dr. Sneha Kannan, a critical care physician and the study's lead author, toldThe New York Times that she was surprised by the extent of the difference between the two.
Patients at private equity-owned hospitals saw a 25.4% increase in adverse events such as falls and dangerous central-line bloodstream infections in the three years after the acquisition, according to the new study—even though the private equity hospitals analyzed in the paper tended to have younger and lower-risk patients.
"Surgical site infections doubled from 10.8 to 21.6 per 10,000 hospitalizations at private equity hospitals despite an 8.1% reduction in surgical volume; meanwhile, such infections decreased at control hospitals," the study shows.
The results indicate that the quality of inpatient care is significantly worse at hospitals owned by private equity firms, which are notorious for bleeding companies dry for a quick profit at the expense of workers and local communities. Over the past decade, private equity companies have dramatically extended their reach in U.S. healthcare, purchasing physician practices, hospice care facilities, nursing homes, and hospitals.
"It's now a familiar story: Private equity buys out a hospital, saddles it with debt, and then reduces operating costs by cutting services and staff—all while investors pocket millions."
The new study in JAMA offers the latest evidence of the private equity industry's increasingly harmful effects on the U.S. healthcare system, which already leaves tens of millions of people uninsured and vulnerable to medical and financial disaster.
A report released earlier this year by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen notes that "private equity has targeted segments of the healthcare industry since at least the 1990s, with many predictable outcomes."
"Among them, shocking lapses in safety have occurred, prices have risen faster than at non-private-equity-acquired entities and patients have been subjected to price gouging schemes," the report states. "The conflict between providers' obligations to provide the best care and private equity investors' insatiable appetites for maximized provides is clear."
The new peer-reviewed study was published just weeks after the Senate Budget Committee launched a bipartisan investigation into the negative impacts of private equity ownership on U.S. hospitals.
"As private equity has moved into healthcare, we have become increasingly concerned about the associated negative outcomes for patients," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), chair of the budget panel, said in a statement earlier this month.
"From facility closures to compromised care, it's now a familiar story: Private equity buys out a hospital, saddles it with debt, and then reduces operating costs by cutting services and staff—all while investors pocket millions," the senator added. "Before the dust settles, the private equity firm sells and leaves town, leaving communities to pick up the pieces."
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