Israel’s Evacuation Order to Gaza Hospital Is “Death Sentence” for Starving Kids
As the Israeli military continues its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, which have included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances and the killing of medical personnel, among other violations of international law, we speak to a doctor currently volunteering in Beirut. Dr. Bing Li is an emergency medicine physician and U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered at Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza earlier this year. Li recounts her experiences in Gaza, where “it feels like death is everywhere,” and warns that Israel’s latest forced evacuation, of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, is “essentially a death sentence” for patients, including children in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Now in Lebanon, Li describes how providers are scrambling to increase healthcare capacity in anticipation of additional attacks.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: A team of United Nations experts has accused Israel of committing war crimes and the crime of extermination for its, quote, “relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” unquote. This comes as medical authorities in Gaza report Israel has killed at least 63 more Palestinians amidst an intensifying siege on the northern Gaza Strip.
The situation at three hospitals in northern Gaza remains critical as medical workers struggle to respond to forced expulsions ordered by Israel. The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, filmed this video from inside the intensive care unit on Thursday.
DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] We are here under threat, because our hospital will go out of service due to the continuous threats to evacuate the hospital and due to the lack of entry of fuel to the Kamal Adwan Hospital. From here, from the middle of the intensive care unit, I call on all the international organizations and humanitarian organizations and the international community to stop the occupiers from implementing their decision to evacuate the Kamal Adwan Hospital and ceasing its services. Stopping the Kamal Adwan Hospital from providing services means the ending of these children’s lives.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Dr. Bing Li, an emergency medicine physician based in Arizona who worked at the Indonesian Hospital in the north of Gaza as a volunteer with Rahma Worldwide. Dr. Li is a U.S. Army veteran. She’s joining us now from Beirut, Lebanon, where she’s working to increase healthcare capacities as a volunteer with MedGlobal.
Dr. Bing Li, thank you so much for being with us. If you can start on the situation in Gaza?
DR. BING LI: Thank you, Amy.
So, the situation, especially in north Gaza, has been incredibly heartbreaking for those of us that volunteered and met many of the people that work in north Gaza in these three hospitals, and for me at Indonesian Hospital, where I spent two weeks.
These people that chose to stay in north Gaza — the doctors, the nurses, the administrators, even the janitors — they stayed because they knew that they needed to be there for their patients. They are the most impressive people, the most courageous and the most principled people that I have ever met, and it has been incredibly hard to hear their stories right now. They are people that never complain, that have unlimited patience, that showed us generosity. Usually when I ask them, “How........
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