Gaza and Charities at War: Doctors Without Boarders and The World Health Organization
A destroyed hospital in Gaza, circa 2014, after Israel launched attacks in Gaza.
Hamas did it, they are still doing it, and they will do it again. The civilized world needs to find and kill or capture them.
In tort law, there are proximate causes in addition to actual causes. Israeli and U.S. policies towards, and treatment of Gaza may or may not be proximate causes. Its too complicated to debate here and I’m not nearly qualified. But Hamas is indisputably the actual cause. It doesn’t get a pass even if there are proximate causes. I’m not sure about tort law but the existence of a proximate cause does not negate, excuse, or minimize responsibility for the actual cause. Hamas must pay and even civil society should recognize the necessity because international human rights are the foundation of international civil society.
But shall the rest of us, thus far comprising proximate cause at worst, become actual causes ourselves in our determination to prosecute the actual cause that is Hamas? History certainly proves we are willing. We have always been willing. In World War II, the allies bombed whole civilian populations, and of course the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on two cities, in both cases to prosecute actual causes, never mind the complex proximate causes contributing to WWII. Nobody except civil society said don’t do it.
Only civil society insists that belligerents uphold and respect international law to the last letter. That’s what Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization are doing. The groups put out impassioned statements over the weekend in response to an Israeli order to evacuate the Al Awda Hospital in the northern sector of Gaza. Several other hospitals have already suffered presumably collateral damage. But the damage includes the deaths of doctors, nurses, technicians and other health care workers. Doctors without Borders had already put out appeals for bombs to stop hitting hospitals, noting that most of the patients are children. “Following the escalation between Israel and Gaza, Israeli forces struck the enclave’s Indonesian Hospital and an ambulance in front of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza,” the post reads. “The strikes killed one nurse, one ambulance driver, injured several and damaged an oxygen station.” It is, of course, a violation of international law to target hospitals or to recklessly fail to take precautions against damaging hospitals or killing health care workers. The World Health Organization’s plea is even starker, referring to the evacuation order as tantamount to a death sentence:
As the United Nation’s agency responsible for public health, the World Health Organization (WHO) strongly condemns Israel’s repeated orders for the evacuation of 22 hospitals treating more than 2000 inpatients in northern Gaza. The forced evacuation of patients and health workers will further worsen the current humanitarian and public health catastrophe. The lives of many critically ill and fragile patients hang in the balance: those in intensive care or who rely on life support; patients undergoing hemodialysis; newborns in incubators; women with complications of pregnancy, and others all face imminent deterioration of their condition or death if they are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical attention while being evacuated.
Health facilities in northern Gaza continue to receive an influx of injured patients and are struggling to operate beyond maximum capacity. Some patients are being treated in corridors and outdoors in surrounding streets due to a lack of hospital beds. Forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence.
darryll k. jones