Politics of Life and Death: Gaza and the Weaponization of Medicine (Frontlines) #1

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life begins at one of today’s most tragic frontlines: Gaza.

In this episode, we talk with Guy Shalev, anthropologist and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, about how medicine has become a political weapon in Israel’s war on Gaza and in the broader occupation of Palestine.

How has Palestinian healthcare been de-developed over the years and what did this mean for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza before the genocide? What were the possibilities and limitations of human rights work before and after October 7? How have Israeli medical institutions been complicit in the destruction of Palestinian lives? And can there still be space for accountability after such devastation?

🎧 To find out, tune into This Authoritarian Life, Season 2, Episode 1 — Politics of Life and Death: Gaza and the Weaponization of Medicine, with Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren.

Read more on...

-why the cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system amounts to genocide: https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/

-the complicity of the Israeli medical establishment: https://archive.ph/lzxNc

-the torture of medical staff from Gaza in Israel: https://www.phr.org.il/en/torture-of-medical-workers/

-the blocking of medical evacuations: https://www.phr.org.il/en/urgent-call-for-humanitarian-corridor/

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Transcript

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Episode Teaser & Jingle

Guy Shalev 0:02

When we look at the attack on healthcare, we see that it has an effect over space and time that is different from bombs. When you uh destroy a hospital, it doesn't only affect the patients and the staff members in the hospital, it affects entire communities that depend on that hospital to survive. And that's a very uh effective tool of cleansing entire areas.

Kristóf Szombati 0:24

You're listening to This Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristóf Szombati, and I'm Erdem Evren.

Introduction to Season 2

Kristóf Szombati 0:46

Okay, so welcome back to This Authoritarian Life. It's been quite some time. We have been absent for six months, I think. Uh we had a lot to do and we needed some money, which we luckily managed to find without them, right? So we're continuing with another season. And this season we had a long discussion and we thought we would organize it around the concept or the idea of the frontline . And what we basically mean by that are, you know, the sites where authoritarian power is being asserted and contested. And the overall goal is to talk to people on the ground who are not only facing, but actively trying to work against an authoritarian dynamic and learn from them. By that we mean seeing events with their eyes to get a sense of the challenges and the dilemmas they face, learning from their various efforts to make authoritarian leaders accountable, to slow down the repressive machinery of the state, or to defend oppressed populations, safeguard spaces of artistic creation and freedom, and of course also to build democratic and egalitarian movements and futures.

Introduction to the Episode & Guest

Kristóf Szombati 1:46

And this first episode of the season was really prompted by coincidence, namely the fact that both our podcast and Guy Shalev, who is here with us today, received a small award called the New Directions Award from the American Anthropological Association. This is the prize that is handed out to recognize efforts to make anthropology and anthropological knowledge kind of accessible to our broader audience. So we would like to congratulate you on the reception of this award. I would also congratulate ourselves a bit in saying that we're very happy to have you awarded this small prize. And let me immediately introduce Guy. So Guy Shalev is a medical and political anthropologist and the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. We'll call that PHRI in the show. He earned his PhD in cultural and medical anthropology from the University of North Carolina. And under his leadership, PHRI has worked to defend the right to health for Palestinians, documenting the medical consequences of both the occupation and the genocide. So occupation in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza, a mission that has obviously taken on ever greater urgency since October the 7th. And before Adam talked about the show itself, I also just want to briefly state that we're recording this episode four days after the ceasefire, the latest ceasefire has gone into effect. So we are on the 14th of October. 20 hostages have been released, bodies of more are coming home to Israel. 2,000 Palestinian prisoners who had been held in for longer or shorter times in Israeli prisons were also released. So this is a moment of expectation, trepidation, joy, and other many other complicated feelings. Probably we'll talk also about this. But I'll let them talk more about how we're going to structure this episode.

Erdem Evren 3:44

First of all, Guy's work and activism are especially relevant for us to address different aspects of the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. And in addition to the elimination, torture, maiming of hundreds and thousands of Palestinian bodies by the IDF and the Israeli settlers, we would also like to talk about something that we would call politics of life and death. So both before and after October 7, Israel has been manipulating and decimating the infrastructures necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of Palestinian life. There are many, many examples like the hampering of access to medical care through the restriction of movement and tightly controlled exit permits for patients, for example, or the starvation through the calculation of minimal calories, the arrest and killing of Palestinian medics, withholding of medical treatment from so-called terrorists, and obviously the destruction of hospitals and medical faculties - an issue which Guy has repeatedly highlighted in his public interventions.

Kristóf Szombati 5:13

So basically, Guy's work and everything that we're going to be talking about in relation to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank brings up this issue of war in the current kind of geopolitical environment and how more particularly authoritarian leaders and leaders pursuing or pushing war machines are using medicine or implementing medicine as a frontline .

Segregated Realities: Jewish and Palestinian Doctors in Unequal Coexistence

Kristóf Szombati 5:35

To start, I guess I would just ask Guy so why did you start doing research on the professional and political lives of Palestinian physicians in Israel?

Guy Shalev 5:45

Oh, so thank you for inviting me. This is really exciting, both uh getting the award and to get to know you as uh co-awardees. Uh so congratulations. So I think what uh was my motivation is to try to understand how Palestinian and Jewish Israeli citizens of Israel work side by side in the same institutions in conditions that are allegedly well, I mean, good, right? Uh a lot of uh work has been done on Palestinians in checkpoints, Palestinians in kind of blue-collar uh jobs, uh serving Israeli society in many ways. And then there's also always the medical sphere, which is considered this neutral area where Palestinians and Israelis work shoulder to shoulder, everyone are equal, everyone are accepted as they are. And then uh the the numbers kind of sort of prove it because you see so many Palestinians making the decision of studying medicine, going into this profession, and 20% of doctors in Israel are Palestinian citizens, 50% of new doctors in Israel are Palestinian citizens. So basically, the future of medicine in Israel is Palestinian. And then this is always kind of described as this uh lighthouse of peace, of coexistence. And I wanted to see how this lighthouse looks like. What happens really when people work together in this in this context with the ethos of medical neutrality that allegedly allows everyone, whoever they are, to come to this profession and care for people, uh, but also in the reality of apartheid, where Palestinian citizens of Israel are uh subordinated to the Jewish supremacist uh Zionist state of Israel? And uh how how does that play out? So that was kind of my uh motivation, I would say.

Erdem Evren 7:47

And maybe we should also stress that you're an anthropologist and you conducted ethnographic research. Uh so can you tell us about like where did you um undertake your participant observation? And also, yeah, like what are kind of the findings of this research?

Guy Shalev 8:05

And maybe first I should acknowledge that I'm a Jewish Israeli person. So uh it was much easier for me. It was I couldn't even imagine a Palestinian doing this research in terms of getting access to hospitals. My research was scrutinized by ethics committees as if doing research with Palestinians is something unethical. I was required to change the title of my research in my applications to the ethics committee, uh, that my research is with Arabs and not with Palestinians. So uh that was, I guess, considered unethical to even imply that they are Palestinians. Uh, and I was indeed uh blocked from doing research in one hospital, but was then allowed to do in two other hospitals in the center of Israel. So I was doing field work uh for three to four months uh in each hospital, and also conducted uh in-depth interviews with more than 100 uh interviewees, doctors, medical students, both Palestinians and Israelis, mostly Palestinians. Uh so that's what uh my research looked like. And in terms of my findings, so I was really looking at how this ethos of medical neutrality works, how it applies in the field. And then what I kind of saw in different ways and different contexts is how this ideal is being applied selectively on Jewish Israelis and on Palestinians living in and working in the same system. So people would work together. For our listeners, we don't really know how a doctor's day looks like. This is a very difficult job. You you you arrive very early in the morning, you're all day running around the hospital. It's a very intense uh uh profession in terms of even physically, just uh I mean, my back really hurts uh after uh doing field work in uh in a hospital. So and the that experience of working together is very powerful. But then you see that they basically live in very different realities. Jewish Israelis can get into political discussions, Jewish Israelis can talk about their kind of vacations uh in in a specific way about going to a demonstration. There's no problem with that. The rules of medical neutrality do not apply in that respect. But a Palestinian cannot be a Palestinian. Basically, a Palestinian needs to check their Palestinianness at the door. Uh if there is a political argument, I'm saying I'm it's not even a political argument, it's just an argument or a discussion about the reality in which people live here, then Palestinian colleagues would just shut up. I know that because I was there, and then I would interview and talk to the people and I said, Why didn't you say what you just told me in that context where you were participating in the conversation? And they said, Of course I cannot say something like that. If a Palestinian somehow criticizes Israeli policies, whether in the West Bank and Gaza or even inside Israel, it is immediately considered, oh wow, you're getting political, and this is something that's not supposed to happen here in the hospital. So in different different mechanisms of how to mark these borders of what a Palestinian can say and what a Palestinian can do. Yeah, I was trying to kind of see these borders from different uh directions and how they apply on the ground.

Kristóf Szombati 11:22

And this was the middle of the 2010s, right? Or when was this research conducted?

Guy Shalev 11:27

From 2014 until 2020, 2021.

Kristóf Szombati 11:31

And so how did you come into contact with what's happening then in the West Bank? Because you're read this research that you just explained to us mostly focused on Israel itself, as far as I understand, and also Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and living in on Israeli territory.

Guy Shalev 11:48

Not as part of my research. I mean, um, that started with my work with the physicians for human rights Israel, with PHRI. Uh, my research was only on Palestinian citizens of Israel, that that of 1948 Palestinians. Uh, this is this was my interest again, looking at a situation where people have the same allegedly civil rights and the same profession, the same paycheck, everything is the same, but still everything is very much different. Um, so yeah, I I only got to to know and learn more about health in in the occupied territory uh where people are not citizens that are subjects of Israeli occupation when I started be getting involved in PHRI. So, how did you get involved in this organization? So I started by volunteering. I mean, my work was in the medical sphere, and I felt like I wanted to also do something. Uh, you know, as anthropologists, we sometimes feel like we only take, we never give back. Uh so I was looking for an opportunity to volunteer in the field, basically, in the field of generally saying the politics of health or health and politics. Uh, so I started volunteering in PHRI's clinic in Jaffa, in Tel Aviv. There's a clinic for uh asylum- seekers, status less people uh living without medical insurance. And basically I started that in 2014 and continued doing it until I became the director in 2022. It was very important for me to be part of this clinic for many years. Whatever I did, I was later on the ethics committee of PHRI and then on the board, the board of directors of the organization. I was then the chair president of the board uh and then uh made the decision to apply for the director's uh role. But throughout that time, I was just in the clinic, accepting patients, opening files, getting their uh referrals. That was something that that I found very grounding and important in terms of being in close connection to the act of care in this reality that really denies care for

The Mission of PHRI

Guy Shalev 13:56

people.

Kristóf Szombati 13:57

So, what's the organization's mission and what kind of work did you do when you became the director?

Guy Shalev 14:03

So the organization was founded in 1988. It was founded by Israeli and Palestinian doctors who wanted to uh address health inequalities between Israeli and Palestinians in a in a way that is co-resistance to the occupation. So not just kind of providing care for Palestinians who are denied care, but also working together as doctors to resist the occupation. In fact, it was, you could say it was founded in Shifa hospital in Gaza. That was one of the first activities that these doctors did. They went to Shifa Hospital, the major, the most important hospital in Gaza, uh, to see the conditions in the hospital, the just unimaginable disparities between a hospital in in Israel and a hospital in Gaza. It was the days of the first Intifada, the first uprising of uh the popular uprising of Palestinians against the occupation. And ever since, this is a major part of our kind of uh work, providing direct care and aid to people, uh, being in this very intimate relation with people that is being created around care, uh, while at the same time documenting human rights violations and advocating for uh a political change in order to change the structures that really uh we need to attend to as caregivers. So we have a clinic in Jaffa for asylum seekers and uh statusless people. We have a clinic in the West Bank, a mobile clinic, that goes twice a week to two different communities a week, with uh usually between 10 and 15 doctors uh to like we see six, seven hundred patients in in such a day uh in a community, provide uh medications, then refer people to experts in cases that need that. Until October 7, we we dispatched uh delegations, medical delegations going into Gaza, more than 100 delegations since the blockade started in 2007. And our last delegation was supposed to leave on October 12. Uh, and of course it was it was cancelled. Uh so that's our kind of direct aid humanitarian wing of the organization. And then we have four research departments, research and advocacy departments. One deals with asylum seekers and statusless people and disparities in health in that context. The other is on inequalities within Israeli society or with between different residents in Israel. They have medical insurance, but still there are inequalities between uh center and periphery, between Palestinian citizens and Jewish Israelis, uh, disparities related to LGBTQ health, to women's health. So that's this uh department. And then uh we have a department dealing with detainees and prisoners in Israeli incarceration facilities. We can talk more about that because this became a very major issue in during the genocide. It was also a major issue before, but of course, uh everything got worse in the past two years. And a department that deals with the occupied Palestinian territory, uh the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, documenting violations, uh mainly international advocacy because there's really no one to talk to here in

The Gaza Blockade and the Medical Permit Regime

Guy Shalev 17:17

Israel in that topic. To the topic of our conversation today, health is being weaponized since 1948, definitely. It didn't begin with the occupation of 1967, but definitely since the occupation of 1967 and uh limitation of movement that was put in place on Palestinians in the occupied territory. Uh, so the development of the Palestinian healthcare system for many years until the Oslo Accords, uh, which uh were signed in the mid-90s, and then the responsibilities, some civilian responsibilities were transferred to uh to the Palestinian Authority, an allegedly independent, uh self-governance uh mechanism of Palestinians, which was never really the case. But it was actually in many cases, in many ways, it it you can look at that as just Israel uh getting rid of its obligation to care for the health of Palestinians. So until then, uh Israel was in charge of the health system uh serving Palestinians, definitely not developed, not even close to what the Israeli uh system looked like in those years. But it was a system. It was a system that doctors and and and other medical workers, Palestinians worked in it. There was movement between Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem. It was all under the occupation of the Israeli government. Uh, and then what what we've we started to see since the first Intifada, and then uh the Oslo Accords, and then definitely second Intifada we'll get which the second Intifada is the around the early 2000s, and then we can get to the when Hamas took control over Gaza, and then the blockade of Gaza. That's uh that that's the kind of closer context we see to the to the genocide in Gaza, a blockade uh of uh uh 16 years before the genocide uh began. So then uh these territories were totally uh separated from each other, a system that was uh definitely lacking, but it was meant to serve the entire Palestinian population. So some treatments were available in Gaza, some treatments were available in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, and then people could get refers. Just for our listeners to uh we need to take a look at the map. This this is all very, very close. It's just one hour away from Gaza to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is part of the West Bank. It's it's these are not any in any way distances. So the whole idea was this one system that's serving everyone. But uh, since these territories were totally cut off from each other, uh and Gaza definitely, once it was put under blockade, that more than two million people living in Gaza basically lost access to a lot of the treatments available in in the other parts of Palestine. And then what was put in place is this uh absurd permit regime that Israel enforced on the people of Gaza. Everyone leaving Gaza had to get a permit, patients accompany people accompanying patients, uh, doctors or other medical workers needing training or going to do fellowships or just studying. All that was cut off, and then the entire system was the result is just people couldn't get the permit. So more than 30%, for example, of children in 2021, more than uh it was 32% of uh applications for children to get a permit to get uh treatment outside of Gaza was were denied. So third of the children could not get the treatment uh they needed outside of Gaza. And then 35% of accompanying family members couldn't get the permit to accompany their children if they if they had to go to treatment outside of Gaza. We worked as PHRI on that topic for many, many years, uh trying to uh to petition the high court for every case that was denied. And it the the absurd is that most cases that we interfered, the permit was given. So in more than 60% of the cases that we interfered, so the 60% out of the 30% we got denied, we we could get the permit eventually, which means that there was probably no security reason. It was just they needed someone else to take a look on that and put pressure on that permit in order to be uh given. And in many cases, because accompanying family members could not get the treatment, we had children, even as as young as two, three, or four-year-old children being hospitalized in East Jerusalem, for example, without a parent. Just imagining sending your four-year-old to go through cancer treatment somewhere else without being able to be next to them. Sometimes it was an aunt, sometimes it was it was a grandma, sometimes it was a neighbor. Just that someone will take care of that of that kid while they were getting treatment in East Jerusalem. And I I might say this is important. Only 4% of uh referrals from Gaza were given to hospitals in Israel. Israel was using that in propaganda all over the world, saying we are caring for Gazan children, we are we are uh we are we are allowing Gazans to be hospitalized in our uh hospitals, providing them care. This is the fringe of the fringe. More than 60% of referrals were to the West Bank of East Jerusalem. So it was Palestinians caring for Palestinians denied uh access uh to do so by the Israeli occupation uh permit regime.

Kristóf Szombati 22:49

From what you said, what that implies is that the healthcare system was somewhat more developed in the West Bank than it was in Gaza, but was it also de-developed there, as you said, or what happened?

Guy Shalev 23:02

Right, definitely it was de-developed, but it was better than Gaza. Gaza under the under blockade was a system that was, we have to acknowledge the the just courage of the doctors and the medical workers of that system for so many years. Uh, working with uh just no uh uh 40 to 50 percent of medications were in stock in Gaza before October 7th. So people had to live with just no medications available. And no, we used to send our delegations there with gloves, with needles, because otherwise they could not perform surgery. Uh so Gaza was definitely in a much worse condition. The West Bank was in better condition. In the West Bank, there are also some private institutions, private hospitals, but also they developed and the reality uh in terms of the West Bank and access to health is is also, of course, uh very problematic. The best hospitals in terms of their ability to develop their ability to access uh medication, access funds are the ones in East Jerusalem, because Israel uh annexed East Jerusalem. So these hospitals, for example, they have an Israeli bank account. So all kinds of limitations on hospitals in the West Bank don't apply to them. So they can purchase, they can get grants from the EU, they can they can work uh much better. And then indeed, two of the most important hospitals in Palestine, uh Makassed and Augusta Victoria, two hospitals in East Jerusalem, uh, that they are also, they also carry the bulk of the weight of caring for Gazans uh and uh for hundreds uh of patients every year to each of these hospitals. In fact, they still have the medical files of a lot of the people that we are now pleading to get out of Gaza because they need their treatments. They're already patients of these hospitals in Jerusalem. But Israel is not allowing, it did not allow even one patient to leave from Gaza to the West Bank and is Jerusalem in the past two years.

Kristóf Szombati 25:01

How do you read this de-development policy? I think you suggested that, you used the word offloading, so kind of get rid of a burden that Israel no longer wanted to carry. Is that your interpretation of this longer historical process of kind of de-developing health care and in these, I mean, in mostly then in Gaza and in the West Bank?

Guy Shalev 25:23

I think maybe before October 7th, I would say it's just disregard for Palestinian lives that is leading these policies. They just didn't care. They can just find their own solutions, get the funds, do whatever they want, care for themselves. It's not our problem as Israel, which is definitely not true according to international law, and not according to Israel's obligation. Uh and the ICJ just ruled that very clearly that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal, and Israel needs to stop that occupation and needs to provide care for these people. But I think it's hard to see the genocide in Gaza since October 7 and not see these policies just creating conditions of life that are impossible for Palestinians to survive, both in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in many ways inside Israel in 1948 Palestine.

Alliance-Building Within the Israeli Medical Community (Before October 7)

Kristóf Szombati 26:15

And I think I would have a question in regards to your efforts to advocate and push for these rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories to be respected. So, what was your experience with that before October 7, before we come to Gaza? Were there sections of the Israeli society that you were able to build alliances with, mobilize? Um, how was it within the medical community?

Guy Shalev 26:44

Okay, so in regards to the health of Palestinians in the OPT, the occupied Palestinian territory, we saw that if we put pressure on international pressure a lot, uh that can have an effect, but that effect is also uh short-lived. So we could, for example, deal with long-term permits, right? Like as I said, these are very critical for many people. And then if we put a lot of pressure on that, get international media on the topic, get diplomats, get politicians to address these early government, talk about long-term permits, then we could see some effect, some kind of easing of processes, allowing permits uh for uh long-term treatment uh needs. The same with getting accompanying family members to children. If we put a lot of pressure under the campaign on that, we could get we could see some results. But then it will all just scale back. And that's what's it was so depressing to see that we uh our our work we feel like has no effect. It affects the individuals that we are getting out of Gaza, maybe, or uh in other cases, but it doesn't uh change the system. The system is just totally uh in its own course of denying health from Palestinians. And then we also work within uh Israeli society. We consider ourselves, we are an organization of medical workers. Uh our staff is comprised of professional human rights uh workers. We are 40 people in the staff, but we have hundreds of volunteers, uh, doctors, and other medical workers, and we see ourselves as part of the medical community. That's why we put a lot of emphasis on communicating with this community and and and trying to get them uh uh on our side, on the right side of caring for the right to health of Palestinians. And we also do that because we see that as effective. Doctors, they are respected in society, they're organized in the Israeli Medical Association, a very strong organization that represents 95% of doctors in Israel. If the IMA strikes for one hour, then the whole country is at unease, let's say that. And if we we are always trying to get them to act, get them to voice uh resistance to this attack on the profession. This attack on Palestinians' health, we we always claim and argue and talk to our uh medical uh doctors' colleagues, it's an attack on the profession and and a very basic idea of care and and how this is supposed to be universal and for everyone with no kind of differentiations. And then we we get we get some some doctors. We we we have, of course, our own community, the doctors that volunteer with us, that that that that write letters for us, that uh read our reports and comment on them. These are the that's our amazing community of medical workers. And we we we in many cases managed, I'm saying that in past tests, unfortunately, we managed to get more and more kind of coalitions within the medical community, the broader medical community to uh to join our uh efforts. For example, in Israel, most most, and I'm saying most is more. Only 90% of detainees are hospitalized in civilian hospitals in Israel, shackled with one arm and one leg to the bed. This is uh against all ethical guidelines. People, when they are hospitalized, they and they are they're they're getting uh care, they need to be in conditions that allows them to receive care and to feel better and recover. Uh and then we got doctors from many hospitals in in Israel to report to us when they see a detainee that is shackled to the bed. We got these groups in different WhatsApp groups in different hospitals, and we we could get them involved, we could get them to pressure the management, and we we we saw uh we saw a difference. We saw that less people are getting uh shackled, we saw that this is something that concerns the IMA, the Israeli Medical Association, concerns the administration of hospitals, uh, and then October 7 came in.

Kristóf Szombati 30:56

Could we summarize that as there was somewhat of a positive trend in relation to the effects of your work that was broken um by this shattering event?

Guy Shalev 31:06

Uh I think there was uh some positive direction, definitely in terms of shackling uh of detainees, but also in other aspects. There was before October 7 began, if if someone of our listeners are following Israeli politics, there was uh a long time of first elections that kind of again and again, five uh elections in one year, and then uh we had uh long time of protests against the the government, the most right-wing government ever to be elected in Israel, and what is defined as the judicial overhaul. And then many more doctors, but not only doctors, of course, from the center and center left of Israeli politics, they're all Zionists and they basically don't care much about Palestinians. That was made clear during the demonstration, but also definitely after October 7. But they we we saw that we are getting closer to them there. We saw that we can get them, recruit them to do uh to be more active in the medical field and in other areas as part of their uh resistance to the government from their own different angle. But it it was definitely a moment where we felt we're getting more of the community involved and more attentive to our uh messages.

Kristóf Szombati 32:25

That's interesting. So this kind of coalition against the right gave you cover or gave you some standing in the in society. That's how I read what your your comments.

Guy Shalev 32:36

Um but Yeah, basically they saw it, they saw us on the same side as they are, which is something that they they hardly saw before, and they of course didn't see after October 7th. But in that moment in time, they saw we are all together again against the government. My parents, who are uh I love them, they're my parents, but they're uh Jewish Israeli Zionists, they they they support Israeli policies for many years. They went to the street. That's the first time I've seen my parents, they are 70-year-old, go to the street in protest. Uh it was the first time in my life, I'm now uh 43, that both me and my parents were protesting against the government. I mean, it was a moment where uh a broader coalition saw themselves together as struggling against the right-wing government. And then October 7 happened, and it it uh of course uh the the whole frame, the whole understanding of politics and lines and borders within these politics uh changed significantly.

The Reverberations of October 7

Erdem Evren 33:37

So, like what were the effects, reverberations of October 7 on your activities and on the you know medical uh profession uh in general?

Guy Shalev 33:48

For Israelis' history started in October 7 in many ways, uh, which is not uh narrative that I would want to accept, but we definitely need to acknowledge that this is the way big parts of Israeli society experienced them today and whatever happened post that day. The first time we had uh it was clear that we are we are seeing this reality, this new reality that is happening in front of our eyes, and this event, this very traumatic and tragic event of October 7, differently from the most part of Israeli society, is when we insisted that it's not it didn't come from nowhere. So we uh issued a statement already on uh Monday. Uh that the the October 7 was a Saturday, and we uh in that statement we addressed the context. So we we we said that this is very tragic, and we are so many violations of human rights and lives being compromised, but also these are people who are uh living under occupation. So we were saying that this didn't come from nowhere. People were uh refugees living under occupation with no hope, no, no uh basic conditions of life, and and October 7 is part of that context. So that moment we got a lot of uh backlash on that. Just uh we actually said clearly, this is not excusing in any way this attack, but this is important, we understand that in its context, and we got a lot of uh hate and attacks on that. And then we immediately uh issued another statement, I think it was two days later, calling for an immediate stop of the fire on Gaza. And uh, it seems obvious that a human rights organization we will call for the end of a military attack on civilians, uh, but that was very uh much not accepted in in Israeli society at that moment. The idea was that this attack is justified. October 7 was horrible and needs to be retaliated, and then we were basically the only human rights organization who has done so and and called for for the stop of the attack immediately once it started. Uh so this was a break. We've seen a lot of our volunteers emailing us, we're not gonna volunteer with you anymore. We got just beages of like uh hate mail and messages all over in every uh platform. So I think that for us it was clear that we are in a different moment now where we are working in a very, very fringe of society. It's our role to to try to uh get our way back and and try to convince people because we see part of our job is to talk to the Israeli public. We publish everything we write in in both English, Hebrew, and Arabic because we want to convince people that what we're saying is is the right thing. We we we we our communication with Jewish Israelis is is very important to us. But it was very clear that we are now in a very different position of that communication with them. Yeah, in terms of our work, we immediately dispatched uh a mobile clinic to the Dead Sea where the uh survivors of the October 7 massacre were uh housed in hotels. Uh so we put a clinic in the uh David Hotel in the Dead Sea where the uh survivors of the uh kibbutz Be'eri attack was they were there. They of course the the the Israeli Ministry of Health or the Israeli government has done nothing to send over any medical uh aid to these people. Uh the Dead Sea is, I wouldn't say dead, but it's a place where there are like uh hotels because people go there on vacation, but there it's there's no city, there aren't any facilities, there's no hospital there. Uh so they just immediately evacuated thousands and thousands of people to these hotels without people that are in very bad conditions, both mentally and physically, without providing them anything. So we immediately dispatched uh mobile clinic there. In fact, our uh our chairperson, Dr. Lina Qasem Hassan, went there on this. Uh she's a Palestinian doctor. She went there that day with the medications she already collected because she was supposed to go to the delegations going into Gaza a few days later. So it's the same medications we wanted to uh distribute in Gaza that we're then uh we distributed with uh Israelis uh in that context. And ever since then, we're doing we're working in emergency mode uh day and night, in communication with our colleagues from the Gaza healthcare system, uh people we worked with with for so many years. Uh a lot of them now are dead, detained, collecting the information on attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities, uh doing a lot of advocacy, doing a lot of work with uh Palestinian detainees. Uh you mentioned before that just now 2,000 detainees were released, while Israeli hostages were, first of all, they are called hostages, but many of the Palestinians are hostages the same way. They were kidnapped from Gaza for no reason, not even charged with anything. They're just held in Israeli facilities in conditions of torture. So 9,000 more are still held after this deal. 9,000 more Palestinians are still held in Israeli facilities. So uh this, of course, deal is not it's not the end of this uh tragedy. Uh yeah, I can speak more about this.

Kristóf Szombati 39:18

Yeah, let's let's let's get a bit into that. I guess the first question is: It correct to assume that there was no way in which you could practically support your former colleagues in Gaza, right, after October 7th?

Guy Shalev 39:29

Yeah. So I think this is something that has really dawned on us very early. We because we as a Jewish Israeli, our whole education system is built on Holocaust studies, basically. All history is Holocaust and what leads to the Holocaust and what follows the Holocaust. And we grew up to kind of not even understand how can an entire society can be recruited to such an atrocity, and whether by being silent or by participating in that. And we got a very vivid example of how that happens. And part of that is getting the Israeli society to be to support the genocide for so long, and in numbers, more than 80% of Jewish Israelis supported the attack on Gaza until the very end. And part of that is I I cannot know what was deliberate policies or what happened uh in practice, but for example, any connection between Israelis and Gaza was totally cut off. So we as an organization registered in Israel, we could not send uh uh medications, we could not uh send our doctors in, we could not send researchers, field researchers to do uh the work there, total disconnect, to the to the point where we now have three different cases against Israeli banks. But the the bank uh denies uh us to use our own funds in our own uh bank account to purchase medications in Greece, for example, and send them through Rafah when Rafah was still open to Gaza. But so yeah, we could not directly support our colleagues. That's part of uh it's it's really heartbreaking, especially uh Salah Hajiye, the director of our mobile clinic, the the uh our staff member that was leading the delegations going in, knowing these people personally, their families. We were the only Israel-based organizations, organization going into Gaza for since the blockade. So he knows Gaza and the people very closely, but he could not, we could not do anything to support our friends and colleagues there. It was it is still

Why the Attack on Gaza Constitutes a Genocide

Guy Shalev 41:40

very much very heartbreaking.

Kristóf Szombati 41:41

Could we talk about the destruction? Because I know it's been talked about a lot, but maybe there are aspects of that that are not known to the wider public. So I'll leave it up to you to tell us what you think is important to know that our audience may not have heard of.

Guy Shalev 42:00

Maybe I'll I'll just give a quick overview because a lot of our audience, I guess, are uh they've read the news, they've seen the videos, they've seen doctors operating in the dark with the cell phone uh camera light on. But in our report on why this attack on Gaza constitutes a genocide, we'll we focus on this attack on healthcare. And according to the Genocide Convention, there are different articles, and there's uh Article 2A that deals with killing, the actual killing, article 2b that deals with uh injuring, both mental and uh physical injuries. And article 2c deals with creating conditions of life that cannot allow a people to survive. And this is what we see very clearly with the attack on healthcare, and we see this attack in five different major ways. One is attacking uh facilities, attacking hospitals, attacking hygiene facilities, wash facilities, sewage water. But the attack on hospitals uh in particular, 33 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were attacked. Raided, many of them raided more than once. Some of them were raised to the ground. The Turkish hospital, the Turkish cancer hospital, the only cancer hospital in Gaza, was bombed, raided, used as a military base for uh the Israeli military while in Gaza, and then raised to the ground with bulldozers. Kamal Adwan, the hospital that is serving the north side of Gaza, was uh raided, burned, some of the wings got burned and could not operate anymore. Shifa, the most important hospital, was raided at least twice with like complete raid raids of the hospital. I can speak more of what a raid looks like because, for example, when the the Israeli military raided Shifa, they put the patients and staff members that were there at the time in naive building, just one small building in the premises, did not provide them uh food, water, and medication. At some point they kicked out the accompanying uh family members of the patients. Two of these patients were children, Rafif and Rafiq Doughnosh, two kids aged 15 and 16, were just there with no family member, no food, no water. Uh they were both uh amputees. They were there because their house was bombed and their mother died. And they were just there for two weeks in horrible conditions, and whatever we tried to do to get them evacuated, the evacuation got denied day after day. So the Israeli military was raiding the hospital and holding these people captive for two weeks in this horrible condition. So this is a raid. This is so this is the first aspect of like attacking institutions, attacking uh infrastructure. The second one is attacking medical workers. More than 1700 medical workers were murdered, were killed in Gaza during the genocide. More than 300 more were detained. These people cannot work, they cannot serve their people, they cannot care for their people in the time that they are most needed. These are almost 10% of the healthcare workforce in Gaza that were either killed or detained. We can talk about the detention and the torture in detentions, but also it's important to understand that also the senior, the leaders of this uh uh system were killed and detained. Uh Dr. Abnan Al -Bursh, the most important orthopedist in Gaza, were killed in in detention. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of the Shifa hospital, was detained. Uh Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the doc the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, was detained and still is, we're hoping now that he will be included in this deal and released. Uh so these are the leaders of this uh system that could not operate. You could also think about the future, right? Because you can get medication in, you can get maybe equipment in, but training 2,000 doctors, 2,000 doctors and medical workers who are missing now, this will take years. And this will affect the the health of Palestinians for many years to come. Uh the third aspect is blocking aid. Medication could not come in, equipment could not come in. Doctors are talking about the very basic idea of not knowing what will come and when it will come. So you don't even know if you should use the same gloves on the second patient or the third patient because you don't know if the gloves are coming in the next truck or not. The very basic idea of pre-stocking hospital, which should be something we all agree on. Hospitals should be operating and should have stocks, was never an option in the past two years. And then the fourth aspect of that is I referred to that earlier, the blocking of medical evacuation. So treatments are not available, hospitals are being raided, doctors are dying, dying or killed, and then thousands and thousands of people in Gaza could not get the treatment they needed. And Israel blocked their evacuation. Thousands and thousands of people. In some point, the estimation that was that 25,000 people were waiting for urgent evacuation. According to the WHO numbers, 15,000 were on the list just waiting. You need to understand that just to be on the WHO list, you need to see a doctor, which is something that not it's not possible for many Gazans during the genocide. Then that doctor needs to report that you need to be evacuated to the Ministry of Health. They need to report to the WHO, and then you're on that list. But still doesn't help you to be on that list. At least we know the recent number I have is from almost a year ago, basically, that more than 600 people just died waiting for for medical evacuation. And here there's a very immediate solution for thousands of them, and that is just opening a corridor from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem. Hospitals are waiting to receive these patients. Israel is just not allowing that movement. And the fifth is what we in medical anthropology call social determinants of health, the destruction of schools, of uh of family uh structures, of being displaced again and again and again, of living in uh IDP camps with no clean water and no sewage systems. This has an effect on health that is just uh uh in many ways even more than what everything every other aspect of care we we just talked about.

Erdem Evren 48:19

Um, with Kristóf we talked about this. It seemed to us that the destruction is obviously terribly affecting um what the Gazans are living on a day-to-day basis. But at the same time, there is almost like a future-oriented calculation behind it in the sense that you know so many vital infrastructures are so powerfully destroyed. You know, some IVF clinics, for example, were also bombed, or we didn't really talk about it, but like one of the world renowned experts on um starvation and famine, Alex de Waal, has recently um written this article in Jewish Currents that you know the famine, yes, you know, hundreds, maybe thousands of people lose their lives, but the material um and the emotional effect of a famine basically is transmitted through generations. So in that respect, I guess yeah, maybe the Israel destruction is not only about kind of destroying, eliminating anything and everything that is on the ground at that very moment, but it actually really wants to implement the long-term, I guess, destruction and crippling of yes life in Gaza, I suppose. Would you agree?

Guy Shalev 49:42

Yeah, definitely. I think that what we what people, genocide experts and uh and others always kind of try to figure is the idea of intent. And uh when you look at this kind of genocide, the medical genocide, the genocide that is being committed through the attack on conditions of life, the intent is just there. It's not a coincidentally that you attack 33 of the 36 hospitals. It's not a coincidence that you kill so many medical workers and detain them. It's not a coincidence that you starve an entire population uh denying them of uh of the very basic uh means to survive. So that's that's one thing, the intent. And the other thing is when we when we look at the attack on healthcare, we see that it has an effect over space and time that is different from just bombs, not just, but different from bombs. When you uh destroy a hospital, it doesn't only affect the uh the patients and the staff members in the hospital, it affects entire communities that depend on that hospital to survive. So, for example, when Kamal Adwan hospital was put out of uh of operation uh in December 2024, 70,000 people who were still at the northern side of Gaza at that time were denied all access to health care. And this relates to what we've seen in Syria and other places. People don't leave, don't necessarily leave if there's not enough food or not enough water. They can find something, they want to stay with the family members who cannot move maybe. But when there's no health care, when a family member needs a doctor or needs uh attention and there's nothing available, then you move. You have to move. And that's a very uh effective tool of cleansing entire areas. And the other aspect is time. This is a genocide that is, some argued it's not a genocide because look how slowly they kill uh Palestinians, they could kill them much faster. So you can see that in terms of time frame of this genocide, you just you kill them slower with this attack on conditions of life, but the ramifications to the future are for years and generations to come, as you as you just said. So this even now that we've we are seeing this so-called ceasefire, people are going to keep dying because there are there is no healthcare, there is no proper food and medications, there is there is no clean water. I mean, the genocide didn't end, and I'm I'm not even sure when we could put a uh a moment in time where it ended, or we are we

Was Hamas Hiding in the Hospitals?

Guy Shalev 52:12

are past that.

Kristóf Szombati 52:13

I mean, at this point I have to ask you to comment on this quite obvious um effort on behalf of Israeli politicians to claim that the attacks on hospitals were due to Hamas um hiding in these facilities. Um, even in one case, as far as I remember, having its headquarters, one of its headquarters under these facilities. Could you comment on that?

Guy Shalev 52:35

First of all, this is a claim that Israel is pushing for since 2008. So we have been hearing that from uh what was called caste-led, the attack on Gaza in 2008-2009. Then there was uh the first time we've we've seen this claim that Shifa is basically a command center of Hamas. And then this claim has been used very intensely in this uh during the genocide. Uh the spokesperson of the Israeli military presented this uh animation of uh Shifa Hospital and how many tunnels are underneath and the rooms and how they fire rockets from command centers under the hospital. There's a good reason why they do so. Because according to international law, a hospital loses its protection uh only when it's uh is used as uh uh a mean to attack the opponent. Right? It's not enough to say there's a Hamas person in the hospital as a patient or even just hiding there. It it doesn't cause the hospital to lose protection. It has to have a role in attacking the opponent. And then Israel raided Shifa twice, had control over the entire premises. If if if you now I always, when I talk to people, I show them this animation that these spokesperson showed in 27th of October 2023, with different wings and departments, and this is where there's a command center for that wing of Hamas. This is and then they they showed nothing. They showed nothing, they showed one tunnel with two rooms uh of two meters by two meters, and they allowed just two reporters in, two international reporters in, then they destroyed it, and that's in the case that they have something. In all the other 33 hospitals, we've been hearing these arguments in 27 out of the 36 hospitals. Israel claim for 27 out of 36 hospitals that they are used by Hamas. But then the evidence is very thin, and then you need to consider what's the proportionality. According to international law, if uh a hospital is used as a command set or for military use, then you need to uh warn the hospital that it is being used uh as such, then the hospital needs to have an opportunity to stop acting as such. So you you you cannot just attack the hospital, you have to allow them time to get the competence out of the hospital and stop using the hospital, for example. And then also you only can attack specific areas of the hospital where you suspect that there's uh command centers. You can uh this wing or the other department, you cannot take over an entire hospital or an entire system, a healthcare system, with this very thin evidence. Uh and again, Israel now has all the opportunity in the world to show the evidence for the claims that they have been giving, they're they're being uh saying for so long. It's it's it really is for me, it sounds like the uh the US claim that there are uh weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They said so, and then they said, oh, well, there wasn't any. But you need to show the evidence, and you cannot continue selling that argument to the entire world that buys that every time I'm interviewed in every media, uh international media everywhere. Still, this argument by Israel is somehow playing a role when we all know it's a charade. That argument has no basis enough, definitely, uh in order to justify an attack on an entire healthcare system.

Kristóf Szombati 56:08

Yeah, well, the argument was made so pervasively that the effect is that you're kind of we're also forced to bring this into the discussion.

Guy Shalev 56:16

I uh it's good that you asked because otherwise some of the listeners will say, oh, they didn't address that. I know that. That's I I've been experiencing that for so long. But really, we what we need to consider uh when I mean thinking of other conflicts, how far can can can that go? And and in terms of also why do we trust these uh these these claims by uh a military that commits a genocide that uh uh has shown disrespect of international law systematically, but still I have to tell you, because uh that this genocide it's absurd. No one thought, I don't know, maybe some people thought, I I could never think that it will last for two years. I thought governments, the US government, the European governments will make Israel stop, but uh it's uh somehow this argument kept uh being used and effectively in order for them to continue the genocide. And that's what's so sad about it. That's for the victims, the the Gazan people who were uh exterminated because of these uh false accusations. But also, like you said in the beginning, for every hospital, every medical facility, every uh medical worker in the world working in the context of conflict, they're not protected. And they know they're not protected. I mean, and who can argue now that the principle of protection of healthcare and healthcare facilities is something that the EU can stand behind? The EU has done nothing. Why why would anyone anywhere in the world would would believe that this is uh uh uh something that's gonna uh protect uh

Human Rights Work: What Is It Good For?

Guy Shalev 57:51

healthcare?

Erdem Evren 57:52

Can I finally ask maybe something about being on the frontlines of all this in the midst of this genocide? Like I don't know how to pose that question, I guess, but do you feel like you know what your work is in vain, or do you kind of sometimes get the impression that okay, you know, your documentation, your mobile clinics, your you know involvement, they actually make some incremental changes? Or has that changed um since October 7th? Like your feelings uh about your own work and your organization's work?

Guy Shalev 58:34

It's hard to say. From one aspect, we feel like our work is more important than ever because we're dealing with uh just atrocities in scale when we have never been dealing with. But then we we we we feel like we can't stop it. This is our day-to-day experience of like just seeing these things in front of our eyes. We're now going to publish a report on the death in incarceration facilities in Israel. We identified 94 detainees who died in the past two years in Israeli facilities. And we've been working on that from day one, and it was clear that if there is no oversight, the ICRC is not getting access, the International Committee of the Red Cross is not getting access to Israeli prisons and detention centers. High court judges are not paying visits, our lawyers and our doctors are not allowed in. People are going to keep dying. And we we see we see that in front of our eyes. And we submitted petitions, we we worked, uh, we we've done a lot of advocacy. We couldn't get anything to move. I mean, just getting the ICRC in, which is the most basic requirement. The petition we submitted to the High Court was uh delayed more than 19 times. Really, I stopped counting after after the nineteenth time, it was delayed. So the court just allowed that uh disasters to disaster to go on of people held in a facility, being tortured, being denied medical care. And just dying there in dozens. But then you also see that people care. And people care because people care around the world about our work. Our report on, for example, on the detention of medical workers has done a lot of uh effect in terms of the demonstrations and struggle against the Israeli genocide. When the British government announced that they're not going to allow more, they're going to freeze weapons deals with Israel. So one of the items was the torture in detention facilities, for example. So you see that our work is being read, it is doing something, but then you wake up the next day and you see the numbers. 70 Gazans died today, 80 Gazans died today, uh six kids died of starvation. It's this kind of uh world that I think we are all experiencing. I'm not sure even how we are uh digesting it personally, as people in the frontlines , as you said. But also we are not in the frontlines . That's part of what we kind of continue to feel like. We are not those, I mean, in the frontlines are the medical workers in National Hospital in Khan Younis who are being bombed, their families are being bombed, their families are being uprooted from one uh area of Gaza to the other, but they still continue working in hospital in just unimaginable conditions.

Kristóf Szombati 1:01:29

But I mean, you are on the frontline in another sense, not on the medical front lines, because those are, as you said, the doctors in Gaza and I guess the West Bank as well. But um on the frontlines in the sense of trying to defend basic rights for um detainees, but also you know, people's um medical needs. So looking looking forward, do you see a chance that your organization could support a process of reckoning within Israel or coming to terms, dealing with I don't know what the right words are, with what happened?

Guy Shalev 1:02:03

Um no. That's the short answer, and that's because the three main issues that are now at stake are freedom for Palestinians, rebuilding, and accountability. And none of these three have any uh presence in Trump's plan. The plan or kind of any kind of peace that people are now just uh floating uh is not about Palestinian freedom. It's not going to even advance us a bit into the freedom of Palestinians. The rebuilding seems more like uh real estate deals that people are gonna just gonna make a lot of money on the back of Palestinians without allowing Palestinians to rebuild their own society, leading this rebuilding, leading the somehow go back to life. And accountability. I think that the part of the complicity we've been seeing in the the past two years is gonna, we're gonna see the implications of that now. Governments, leaders, they're all complicit. It's their interest, it's in their interest to to move forward and not look back and not deal with the crimes that have been done, not deal with the justice that that the victims are uh deserve. But also, frankly, I don't think we'll be able to operate. We are already under attack by the Israeli government since this government was elected uh in 2022. Uh, but we are there there's legislation that uh is supposed to tax our funding from uh what they call as foreign entities, which is the UN, the EU uh governments, uh by 80%. So uh this is basically a death blow to the entire field of uh of human rights uh organizations based here in Israel. The human rights based in Palestine are outlawed, uh, these designated as terrorist organizations and are now also the Trump administration also uh uh designated them for sanctions. The international organizations are not uh they need there's a new registration law that Israel implemented, that they cannot operate uh uh fully in Gaza now to even collect the information and the evidence on the ground. Uh so they're shutting down the internationals, the Palestinians, us Israelis, Israeli organizations, and we I I don't see how we I hope, and we're still gonna do whatever we can, but the reality is that this sort of peace deal is gonna allow Netanyahu's government enough room to continue their uh judicial overhaul and their attack inside Israeli society, Israeli politics to consolidate authoritarian control.

Kristóf Szombati 1:04:58

Yeah, for the record, all everything you just mentioned from the foreign agents law to the registration of um organizations that do not share the goals of people in power. That's been tested and tried in places like Hungary and Turkey and Russia, and and we could go on. So it's unfortunately part of the repertoire now. Um Erdem, is there still something we should ask?

Erdem Evren 1:05:26

So my sense is that your organization was established also as a reaction to the complexity of the uh mainstream Israeli uh medical institutions, I suppose, or maybe their silence, or maybe their direct involvement in the occupation and some of the crimes committed by the IDF. Um could you kind of give us a broad description of like in what ways the Israeli medical establishment or Israeli doctors and medical institutions get involved in the activities of the IDF and the occupation in general?

Guy Shalev 1:06:02

So so what as I said before, the the the ability to commit genocide is definitely connected to a support from society. And what we we've been seeing in the in the medical community, in the medical in the medical establishment, the Israeli medical establishment is that they're complicit in this genocide in many different ways, and uh most directly in ethical violations of medical ethics. The Minister of Health uh announced very early on that Israeli hospitals will not admit Palestinian detainees and hospitalize them and care for them, which is a clear violation of medical ethics. But then you can say he's a minister, he maybe he's a politician, but then two directors of the two most important hospitals in Israel, Hadassa and Sheba, these are hospitals that are respected worldwide. Sheba was just elected one of the ten best hospitals in the world. And the directors of these hospitals also announced that they are not going to admit Palestinian detainees in their hospitals. There are also kind of more kind of on-the-ground medical ethics violations that's important to acknowledge, a substandard treatment that Palestinian detainees uh got in Israeli hospitals. We have whistleblowers in these hospitals describing early release of patients not administering painkillers uh to Palestinian detainees, releasing of tortured Palestinian detainees back to the institutions where they were tortured. There was a Palestinian detainee who was sexually abused. It became famous because also there were leaked uh videos of that case. And then he was hospitalized in a civilian, Israeli civilian hospital, only to be released three days afterwards with very uh partial treatment back to the facility where he was tortured, where the his torture was still there serving. Shackling in four limbs of basically all Palestinian detainees uh during the past two years. Not notifying their families. A hospital's most basic uh uh kind of obligation to a patient is notifying the family, this person is now hospitalized, just that you know that, right? So they're not doing that, they haven't done that for Palestinian detainees. And then there are doctors, vis-a-re doctors who who clearly explicitly called for the attack on Palestinian hospitals. There was a petition signed by 80 doctors, some of their senior doctors. I have friends who are uh some of the signees are the directors or teachers in kind of advanced studies programs for doctors. They're signed on that. None of them were disciplined for that, for this clearly absurd call to attack hospitals by doctors. And very importantly, the censorship and witch hunting of Palestinian doctors in the Israeli system. Doctors who posted online empathy to the children of Gaza, or the most basic kind of comments on the on the genocide, just saying the word genocide, were fired, were disciplined, there became this culture of snitching on people, people were looking into their colleagues' uh social media and then reporting to the administration that someone uh said that the children of Gaza deserve lives or something like that. And that person would be uh disciplined. I know personally the people who got fired were about to publish a report on that. It would take a few more months until it's out. And then the the IMA, the Israeli Medical Association, has done nothing to support these people, has done nothing to investigate ethical violations that are being taken, are being acted by Israeli doctors, members of the IMA, the head of the ethics bureau of the IMA, uh Dr. Yosef Walfisch, uh visited Sde Teiman, the notorious Sde Teiman facility where there was a field hospital that where the entire operation of this facility is a violation of medical ethics. Visited this facility and then published in an Israeli website that he witnessed the most moral and dedicated doctors he's ever seen. Of course, sounds exactly like the IDF is the more and most moral um military in the world. There was full recruitment by this system to do propaganda for Israeli international uh platforms and to support the genocide on the ground. If you wanna if our listeners want to read more about that, we published an article at the New York Review of Books. It's entitled 'The Shame of Israeli Medicine', where a lot of these violations are mentioned there.

Erdem Evren 1:10:31

We'll provide the links in any case.

Kristóf Szombati 1:10:34

We will. Um Thanks so much.

Acknowledgements

Erdem Evren 1:10:39

So that's it from us for today. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Kristóf Szombati 1:10:45

We would like to thank our contributors, music and mastering Shai Levy, artwork and graphics Polina Georgescu, editing Vera Jónás, and our in-house communications advisor Anna Szilágyi.