In October, the video from Gaza began to circulate that terrified the world. He showed the injured teenager lying on the hospital Greney with an intravenous drop in his hand. As the flames break through, he can wave anything but wave his hands in agony.
The fire that swallowed Saban al-Gad Before our eyes, who also killed his mother and younger brother and sister, a bomb caused by the Israeli army lowered at the Al-Aqs Hospital Hospital in Deir El-Balah, where he was treated for that injury when he survived more One Israeli bombing.
A video of the death of Al-Gadalo-who has compared many observers to the pictures defined by Atroocity, such as Pulitzer’s 1972 prize photography from nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Kim PHúc, which burned American Napalm in Vietnam-isolated nightmare.
Different forms of brutal death have been going on thousands of times in Gaza in the last 15 months, often as a result of the US weapon provided by Israel by the United States Government. These deaths are neither individual tragedies nor unintentional consequences; They are the symptoms of the Israeli strategy of the overall war and the irresistible horror inflicted on the whole nation. This reality and how we have to answer it is nowhere clearer than on the ruins of Gaza’s hospitals.
MK-84 bombs and hospitals gauze
Recent reviewed studyOne of us is a co -author, he examined the patterns in Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s belt during the first 40 days after October 20, 2023. This especially analyzes the Israeli use of bombs with MK-84S) with the US supply (MK-84s) around hospitals, which provide international and basic ethical imperials with special protection against war works.
The MK-84 are 2000 kilograms (900 kilograms) of explosives that are released by air known as the “bunker buusters” -stio to destroy infrastructure and kill human beings within hundreds of meters from where they land. They are weapons of non -select destruction and destruction, not “targeted strikes” against discrete goals.
Using geoprostic data, the study found that Israel had fallen MK -84 in an explosion range of more than 80 percent of Gaza hospitals in just the first 40 days of their war, including one bomb rejected 14.7 meters (48 feet) from the hospital – Effectively direct hit.
Many hospitals had not only one, but more than these massive bombs fell around them. Two hospitals had more than 20 MK-84 crater bombs within 800 meters (upper end of infrastructure damage to MK-84 and serious injury explosion) of their facilities; The second hospital had seven bomb craters within 360 meters (MK-84’s deadly range) of its patients’ departments. Thirty-eight MK-84 is detonated in the range of hospitals within the evacuation zone defined by Israel.
During this initial period of Israeli acute gauze destruction, international controversy raged for weeks for the claim that Israel had bombed even one hospital. The Israeli government and the media, together with their colleagues in the US and Europe, have repeatedly denied that Israel would attack the hospital-crown of a well-established humanitarian law. Simultaneously, Israeli violence enabled This, shamefully, included older American doctors and bioethics, began to publish alleged justification for any such possible action.
By December 2024, more than 1,000 Palestinian health workers were killed Israeli attacks, and unambiguous evidence showed that the Israeli army armed with US weapons not only one, but almost all hospitals in Gaza. What is once said that it reflects incredible and slander is now taken for granted as a key component of everyday Israeli military behavior.
In May, in the meantic recognition of this reality after eight months of viewing that Israel uses thousands of bombs delivered to the US to destroy the strongly populated areas of Gaza and kill countless civilians, the Administration of Biden paid the MK-84s shipment in Israel, sending bombs from 500 pounds (227 kg). Last week, Trump’s administration announced that she continued the MK-84 shipment to Israel without any conditions.
New paradigm: horrorism
The philosopher Adriana Cavarero wrote about such horror acts a frame called “horrorism”. With this expression, he describes a form of impersonal violation of rooted in discernment – like the burning life of patients in hospital beds – and massacre, such as those we have witnessed every day in Gaza.
The concept of horrorism requires that we approach the violence not from the perspective of the perpetrator – as is often done in war – but victims. Only the victim has the authority to appoint violence, to decide its meaning and value. The character of a helpless victim is most clearly represented by Cavarero by children, such as thousands of Palestinian children who have been maiming and killing Israeli soldiers and American weapons in the last 15 months.
Hope for horrorism as an ethical paradigm is that by displacing the preoccupation with “terrorists” and reflection of violence through lenses most vulnerable or those who need the most careful concern, we could end the “war against terrorism” without any design “this is reproduced by the horror of horror for the brightest people in the world , which, surprisingly, is still rebelled.
As a first -hand and desperate petition of doctors, nurses and other health workers who provide care in Gaza, they are excitingly illustrated, the resonance of horrorism in hospitals may be deeper and more persistent than in any other context. And doctors, who have privileged approach and obligations to the brightest – together with significant collective economic, cultural and political powers – have a unique position from which they will apply horror lessons to condemnation and stop violence.
Horrorism begs us to see and judge violence from the hospital’s psychic – refuge for displaced, crippled and dying. Doctors, therefore, should be evangelist of horror, accused of not only healing the wounded, but also to do whatever they can to cure the world deciphering and stopping wars that inflict deaths and disability to those who are attractive to us for care.
Total war and genocide
The horror of the colonial wars is the central feature of what another philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, described half a century ago as an increase in the new form of the “total war” in the post-colonial era, which began after World War II.
In her book Combat Trauma, anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj thinks of Sartre’s description of French and American wars against Vietnam. As El-Haj says, while the imperial powers have tried to throw out anti-corolonial movements of independence, “colonial forces retained their superiority in terms of weapons, but were in a distinct lack of number.”
When you face a “enemy” consisting of armed fighters whose dream of freedom is aided by the entire population, the colonial army is “all but helpless”-in accordance with the so-called rules of humane war and respect for civil life, that is.
Their only hope that they will defeat the enemy in this scenario is to put such rules aside and apply to the destruction of the whole nation. In this paradigm, no bombing of hospitals can be avoided or prevented by the respect of the law or life; This is a strategic necessity.
“Total genocide,” Sartre noted, “he is revealed as the foundation of the strategy against Guerile.” Colonial power, genocide appears as a “only possible” response to “the rebellion of the whole nation against its oppressors”, which resulted in a “total war” that is no longer between the two armies.
The overall war in colonial conditions “fights to the one hand” against mostly helpless people. Sartre concludes that this “genocidal blackmail” was not only a threat to the Vietnamese population, but that its violence was “committed under our eyes every day.” This turned everyone who did not condemn it into the “experiments”.
Dehumanization that applied this brutal, brutalis and passive consumers of this horror brings Sartra to conclude that “a group that Americans try to destroy through the Vietnamese nation is the whole of humanity.”
Parallels between Sartre’s analysis of American violence in Vietnam and American support for the war of Israel – which was seemingly against Hamas, but, in reality, measured by more than 17,000 dead Palestinian children, obviously against all Palestinians in Gaza – they are too obvious to them neglected.
Responsibility and reparation
In the days after Al-Galou burned, the media around the world published stories about their lives and death. Among the anecdotes presented was his hope that he would become a doctor – a detail that underlies the cruelty of his murder while seeking care in the hospital.
It also greatly alleviates the refusal of the rejection of the American Medical Profession in the last 15 months to accept its obvious ethical obligation to use its significant political power to counteract obviously criminal attacks on hospitals, healthcare professionals and patients by demanding the end of the USA weapon supply to Israel for these crimes.
As doctors based in the US, we have repeatedly invited on Our profession – The one who claims that he is rooted in the commitment to care, human dignity and the most vulnerable – to change the course and that he bravely acts against the violence in gauze in accordance with our alleged principles. Now, as a permeable interruption has been reached, it must include critical retrospection and responsibility for our gross ethical and political defects that Gaza genocide has put on a complete view.
But we cannot stop at simply rhetoric and moralizing self -reflection. We need to insist on the reparative measures, including the liberation of thousands of Palestinian civilians – including Dr. Hussam Abu Safia and many other healthcare workers – took hostage of Israel, renewing the entire territory of Gaza Strip Palestinians and paying for the reparation of Israel, USA -a European nations that enabled genocide as genocide would support the complete renewal of Gaza, including his homes, hospitals, universities, sanitary infrastructure and schools now lying in ruins.
We also need to require the end of the Israeli occupation and the permanent violent attack of Palestinian countries and the embargo on the provision of weapons to the Israeli government, which has very clearly proven to be willing and eager to use them against the civilian population, violating international law.
If the US government supports Israeli efforts to occupy Gaza, to force its Palestinian residents to exile and to refuse Palestine their rights to return to their country, as we now see early indications Then we have the obligation to decipher the force and opposition to such crimes. The reality is that violence against the Palestinians has not ceased and we must not be fooled by thinking that our ethical obligations have ended in relation to it.
While organizing each other with each other to start an impossible, but the task of collecting violence with which our nation and its medical field – II beyond – are we have to possess our ethical responsibility on the memory of those who, like, like Shabaan al -Galou, They were also killed to those who now have to try to live in the shadow of immense horror.
Opinions expressed in this article are authors and do not reflect the views of any institutions with which Al Jazeere is connected or editorial.
