[News] The wounds bear witness
Anti-Imperialist News
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Tue Feb 11 11:46:41 EST 2025
WRITERS AGAINST THE WAR ON GAZA
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*To healers,*
/This edition of the W.A.W.O.G. Bulletin features work from the latest
edition of The New York War Crimes. Here is the editors’ note written by
members of WAWOG and Healthcare Workers for Palestine:
/
“Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could.
Remember us.”
Dr. Abu Nujaila wrote these words on a whiteboard in Al-Awda Hospital on
October 20, 2023, one month before he was martyred in an airstrike while
treating patients.
This work is, above all, a tribute to those who stayed: the living, the
martyred, and the disappeared. We aim to convey the substance of their
convictions — from reports and analyses of Zionist terror to
testimonies, poems, and songs of resistance, altogether reflecting the
role of Gaza’s medical workers as a bulwark against death and despair.
Their courage is a north star for healthcare workers everywhere, a call
to discard shallow humanitarianism for principled action against the
systems of oppression that degrade health and extinguish life.
For 15 months, we witnessed Zionists pursue the systematic and
calculated destruction of all healthcare infrastructure in Gaza. We
witnessed children reciting scripture to bear the pain of surgery
without anesthesia; patients with IVs in their arms immolated in tents
outside incinerated hospitals; the decomposing bodies of premature
babies; the uncovering of mass graves filled with corpses wearing scrubs
and patient gowns. Every hospital has come under the fire of snipers,
drones, tanks, and airplanes; at the time of this writing, only six have
been restored by Palestinians to partial functionality.
The Israeli Occupation Forces have kidnapped, tortured, and murdered
hundreds of the doctors, nurses, medics, and medical students who embody
the last line of defense, not of the self, but of the people, the land,
and life itself. The Zionist entity insists on dismantling this
life-saving apparatus, as its very existence thwarts the Zionist
project. As long as Palestinians are kept alive, whether by armed
fighter or by healthcare worker, the Zionist project cannot win. “We are
a small brave nation,” Ghassan Kanafani said of Palestine in 1970, “who
will fight to the last drop of blood to bring justice to ourselves after
the world failed in giving it to us.”
The world’s failures have rarely been so profound. As Gaza’s entire
healthcare sector lies in ruins, the American medical establishment
aligns itself with the genocidaires. At best, it feigns political
neutrality. At worst, it actively suppresses voices advocating for
Palestinians and recommits support to the Zionist colony through
financial investments, research partnerships, and academic exchange
programs. It is no surprise that the exposing of a racial ethnostate
threatens the American medical establishment, steeped in a history of
scientific racism and eugenics. Decades of American physicians forcibly
sterilized tens of thousands of poor, native, Black, brown and disabled
women, a practice lauded and adopted by the Nazi regime. While centuries
of racialized domination, increasing wealth inequality, and ongoing
residential and environmental segregation inevitably lead to poorer
health outcomes for the marginalized, access to life-saving health
services have and continue to be segregated along these same lines.
American healthcare workers are employed as the front-line keepers of
these oppressive hierarchies, prescribing life and death at the behest
of empire and capital, while insurance companies sit atop like vultures,
making a killing off of the dying.
What, then, does it mean to be a healthcare worker in the heart of
empire, laboring for a system invested both in the slow death of a
racialized population at home and in the Zionist decimation of health in
Palestine? How can we organize a healthcare workforce in active
solidarity with Palestinian liberation, and by natural extension, the
liberation of all oppressed peoples? To start, healthcare workers of
conscience must reject our assignment as keepers of the hierarchy —
refusing engagement with carceral systems, aligning ourselves loudly
with the marginalized, and demanding our employers and institutions
boycott and divest from the war machine. We must be willing to take
collective risk and put our bodies on the line anywhere and everywhere
the economy of death rears its head.
Healthcare workers in Gaza, past and present, have lit the path forward.
Their principled care for their patients and communities fundamentally
opposes the exterminationist project of colonization, and resists the
ongoing Nakba. In the aftermath of a ceasefire, the healthcare workers
of Gaza undertake the liberatory and revolutionary project of
surveilling the full extent of the entity’s destruction and rebuilding
the life-sustaining apparatus. They will be the first to reckon with the
more than 100,000 injured Palestinians, at least a quarter of whom will
require rehabilitation for life-altering injuries, a poisoned water and
sanitation infrastructure which will continue to cause infectious
disease for years to come, and the profound psychological impact of 15
months of genocide exacerbating years of siege and occupation,
manifested by the grim reality that over 50% of Gaza’s children wish to
die. The fight is far from over. In the words of Fayez Rashid, Gaza’s
healers embody “faith in the justice of their cause,” a cause whose
righteousness has never been more clear.
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*Give to help sustain life in Gaza *
*Al-Rahma Medical Clinic *
*
A new clinic in Jabalia offering essential medical services free of
charge
*
Dr. Shehab’s clinic is staffed by three doctors and two nurses
working tirelessly to ensure accessible healthcare in northern Gaza.
Donate here
<https://a1e0.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=67ab580f1c8a931a008a6e4c&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiny.cc%2Fshehabclinic&w=652d927728633b1fc42bd442&c=b_67aa3b78c46470393c21ed6f&l=en-US&s=_ga9KRfrrqvvYXizh-j0VAXOuPk%3D>.
*Prosthetics for Palestine*
*
Support the amputee population in Gaza by sourcing existing
prosthetics for donation and designing new ones
*
Prosthetics for Palestine is a volunteer-led initiative. Our goal is
to work collaboratively to source and build sustainable prosthetics.
Donate here
<https://a1e0.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=67ab580f1c8a931a008a6e4c&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.prostheticsforpalestine.org&w=652d927728633b1fc42bd442&c=b_67aa3b78c46470393c21ed6f&l=en-US&s=3TutdXqArPaZQgCC0ST5im_DVAA%3D>.
*The Samir Foundation*
*
From under the rubble to a brighter Palestinian healthcare system
*
We are committed to creating a tangible impact on the healthcare
system in Gaza by focusing on medical education and support for
medical students. Donate here
<https://a1e0.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=67ab580f1c8a931a008a6e4c&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsamirfoundation.org&w=652d927728633b1fc42bd442&c=b_67aa3b78c46470393c21ed6f&l=en-US&s=qeDIF7uQgQ44oB7P2bqmYDB5qZw%3D>.
*The Refaat Alareer Camp*
*
A Sameer Project initiative to support displaced families in central
Gaza
*
The Sameer Project is a donations-based aid initiative, led by
Palestinians, working to supply emergency shelter and aid to
displaced families in Gaza. Donate here
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*Doctors Against Genocide, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, and Within
Our Lifetime fundraiser*
*
For Gaza and the West Bank: Contributions go to medical supplies,
food, water, warm clothing and blankets.
*
Donate here
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*Download, distribute, discuss the new edition *
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*Protect Palestinian medical workers*
Of the many atrocities funded and abetted by the Zionist project, the
targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza stands out.
Kamal Adwan Hospital was the last remaining major medical facility in
Northern gaza and on December 27, 2024, Occupation forces raided and
incinerated it, taking the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya, into custody and transporting him to the notorious Sde Teiman
prison camp.
“Israel” has detained over 350 Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza
without charge since October 2023. Detainees have been tortured by means
of starvation, drugging, medical neglect, prolonged exposure to cold,
forced nudity, sustained stress positioning, sleep deprivation,
electrocution, and rape. The harm, as evidenced by testimonies compiled
in a 50-page report
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released by Palestinian non-governmental organization Healthcare Workers
Watch, is inversely proportional to the ability of Palestinian
healthcare workers to sustain Palestinian life. The intent is genocide.
Many formerly detained healthcare workers describe tortures designed to
impair fertility, often by causing trauma to the testicles. A nurse’s
graphic testimony: “[The interrogator] completely removed my clothes and
inserted this tool into my genital area. I started screaming like crazy.
This went on for about an hour, and then I began to involuntarily
urinate blood. He then inserted the tool again, more forcefully, and
left it inside while I was bleeding. He resumed beating me while the
tool was still inside my genital area until I fainted. I endured this
torture for about 19 hours.”
On the charge of keeping their people alive, the healthcare workers of
Gaza are guilty. They are a bastion against the genocidal project. They
are the final line of defense against a terrorist settler-colonial
state. And they continue to see their duties through.
*We leave you with the words of Dr. Ezzedeen Shehab:*
Perhaps this is the inexplicable wonder of Gaza: that amid a
ceaseless storm of cruelty, the will to live endures. Like the
ancient olive trees rooted in battered soil, we refuse, against all
odds, to surrender our fruit.
/*Read Dr. Shehab’s full account of Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospital
system **here*
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*/
Until liberation,
*W.A.W.O.G.*
Twitter: @wawog_now
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1) Words left by healthcare workers in Gaza. 2) The front page of the
NYWC. 3) Suturing by phone light at Indonesian Hospital. (Photo by Fadi
al-Wahidi)
Statue of Liberty, New York, NY, 10004, United States
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