Healthcare, Not Warfare.
A brief introduction to Health Workers for Palestine.
Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.
Hippocrates, Precepts VI
The act of healing another is an act of true compassion; it is often the case that in order to heal someone, one must willingly bring harm or difficulty to oneself. This is something that all healthcare workers understand; we all do impossible jobs under impossible circumstances, and we all shoulder the weight of immense grief and undue stress on a daily basis. Having chosen to devote our livelihoods to helping others, there is an ineffable bond we all share, one which we never fail to recognise in our fellow healthcare workers.
That is why we all feel such communion with the healthcare workers of Gaza, who have continued to perform their duties even as the walls around them collapse and their own lives become endangered. We stand with them, we weep for them, we see ourselves in them. Even as they are brought to inconceivable harm and forced to make countless unbearably difficult decisions, in seeing their dedication we ourselves are healed by them.
We did what we could. Remember us.
Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, final message to the world
As of December 6, 278 healthcare workers have been murdered by the Israeli military since October 7. As of December 16, 110 healthcare workers have been kidnapped since October 7, from both Gaza and the West Bank. Many of the doctors in Gaza who were initially kidnapped had been following orders from the Israeli military and proceeded along the designated ‘safe route’ following the illegal evacuations of Al-Shifa hospital and the Indonesian hospital.
We know deep in our bodies that to grieve we must have access to the fluidity of time stolen from us along with our land. Grieving is for corpses that had access to livingness while alive, and that were then ceremonially laid to rest in the earth and sky, in cemeteries, in smoke.
Devin G. Atallah, “Beyond Grief: Decolonial Love for Palestinian Life”
In honour of our Palestinian colleagues, we are hosting weekly vigils every Friday, so that we may collectively grieve on behalf of those who cannot grieve. Even as we mourn the senseless loss of life we have witnessed from halfway around the world, we stand in solidarity with all those whose lives have not yet been taken from us. We demand freedom and justice for the workers who have been abducted by the Israeli military; we demand humanitarian aid be delivered to the people of Gaza; we demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine.