Roger McKenzie, Morning Star, December 20, 2024
Aid group accuses Tel Aviv of deliberate ethnic cleansing in latest damning report
Israeli soldiers move on armored personnel carriers (APC) near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, December 18, 2024
THE medical aid group Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza in a damning new report released on Thursday.
This comes as the Swedish government announced that it was ending its “core support” for the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians (Unrwa).
MSF, the acronym from Doctors Without Borders’ original French name, said Israel was systematically attacking Gaza’s healthcare system and restricting essential humanitarian assistance.
MSF say Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped and bombed. It also says MSF staff have witnessed a relentless campaign by the Israeli forces marked by massive destruction, devastation and dehumanisation.
The report accuses Israeli forces of having prevented essential items such as food, water, and medical supplies from entering the strip on numerous occasions, as well as blocking, denying, and delaying humanitarian assistance.
Fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially functional, and the healthcare system lies in ruins.
The report says that during the one-year period covered by the report — from October 2023 to October 2024 — MSF staff “have endured 41 attacks and violent incidents, including air strikes, shelling, and violent incursions in health facilities; direct fire on our shelters and convoys; and arbitrary detention of colleagues by Israeli forces.”
MSF medical personnel and patients have been forced to evacuate hospitals and health facilities on 17 separate occasions, often literally running for their lives.
The report says that even if the war ends today, the loss of families, repeated forced displacement and inhumane living conditions will scar the population for generations.
MSF’s secretary-general Christopher Lockyear said Israel was guilty of dismantling the infrastructure in Gaza that was essential for life and had strangled access to humanitarian aid in the besieged enclave.
He said: “We are seeing forced displacements, ethnic cleansing in the north, the destruction of infrastructure, physical and mental injuries to the population in Gaza and all of this is undeniable.”
The report said: “Attacks on civilians, the dismantling of the healthcare system, the deprivation of food, water and supplies are a form of collective punishment inflicted by the Israeli authorities on the people of Gaza.
“This must stop now.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry hit back at the report, describing it as “entirely false and misleading.”
In a statement the ministry said Israel does not target innocent health workers and tries to ensure delivery of aid, and charged the medical group with failing to acknowledge Hamas’s alleged use of hospitals as bases “for terrorist activities and operations.”
The MSF report reinforces similar allegations made on Thursday in a Human Rights Watch study.
HRW accused Israel of a campaign in Gaza that amounted to “acts of genocide,” cutting off the flow of water and electricity, destroying infrastructure and preventing the distribution of critical supplies.
HRW executive director Tirana Hasan described the findings of the MSF report as being consistent with her own organisation’s report.
Amnesty International secretary-general Agnes Callamard said the research by MSF was “yet one more report detailing the carnage in Gaza.”
But Vedant Patel, a spokesman for the US State Department, said it “disagreed with the HRW report conclusions of genocide.”
Of the MSF report Mr Patel said the health organisation itself acknowledged that the “intentionality” of any Israeli actions was beyond the scope of its assessment.
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn warned the British government to learn lessons from the report.
He said: “This devastating account of Palestinian suffering should be mandatory reading for government ministers. How much more evidence of genocide does the government need to end its complicity and suspend all arms sales to Israel?”
Director of the Tricontinental Centre for Social Research Vijay Prashad told the Morning Star: “Perhaps the most stunning part of the new MSF report is this simple fact: it could take up to 15 years to clear the rubble and 80 years to rebuild housing.
“This itself shows that Israel has ethnically cleansed Gaza for at least several generations. No further proof is necessary.”
Luciano Zaccara, an associate professor in Gulf politics at Qatar University, says Israelis are trying to push all the people in the north of Gaza out of the area, which has been under siege.
He told the Al Jazeera network that the Israeli operation and siege “has been going on for more than two months without anybody being able to do anything.”
Mr Zaccara said: “There is no doubt about the kind of ethnic cleansing that they are carrying out in the north of Gaza,” he stressed.
MSF said it continued to demand an immediate and sustained ceasefire and safe access to northern Gaza, to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and medical supplies to hospitals.
The aid organisation added that while it continues “to provide lifesaving care in central and southern Gaza, we call on Israel to end its siege on the territory and open vital land borders, including the Rafah crossing, to enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian and medical aid.”
The Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza continues.
On Thursday five children and 12 others were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Shaaban Rais School sheltering displaced people and earlier another five people were slaughtered in the Maghazi refugee camp in Deir al-Balah.
Officials said some people remained under rubble and on roads where ambulance and civil defence crews could not reach them.
The Gaza health ministry said the total number of deaths in Gaza is now at least 45,206 since October 7, when Hamas staged a cross-border raid that killed 1,139 Israelis.
Meanwhile the Swedish government confirmed it was ending its “core support” for Unrwa.
In October, Israel’s parliament approved legislation banning Unrwa activities in the Palestinian territories, a measure that was to take effect in 90 days.
Stockholm said that 800 million kronor (around £58 million) being allocated for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the region next year will instead go through the channels of the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency and the government’s support for other agencies such as the World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund, the UN Population Fund and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Sweden’s minister for international development co-operation and foreign trade, Benjamin Dousa, posted on X that the Israeli decision will make much of Unrwa work difficult or impossible.
But head of Unrwa Philippe Lazzarini said on X: “Defunding Unrwa now will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys across the region.”
He added the decision would “double” the suffering for the people of Gaza.
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