For nearly two decades, I’ve worked in and around hospitals. I know the layout of emergency departments like others know the shortcuts to their childhood homes. When I walk into the hospitals that I work in on a daily basis, I don’t see just buildings or rotas – I see places where people are cared for at their most vulnerable, by others who choose to be there.
The etymology of the word hospital tells you everything you need to know about why this matters. From Latin hospes – guest, host, stranger. A hospital was never just for healing, it was about welcome. Sanctuary. It’s a place where the vulnerable are offered care without question, where strangers became guests and guests are treated with dignity.
The purpose of a hospital is sacred. You treat people, you keep them safe.
Which is why watching Gaza: Doctors Under Attack last night broke something open in me – and why I can’t stop thinking about what happens when that sanctity gets torn up entirely.
Watching it wasn’t just about the footage, harrowing as it was – it was the feeling. The unshakeable sense that something foundational had been broken in the world. Not just law, not just ethics. Something much deeper. Something that connects us as humans to the idea that some places, some people, some purposes should be, without question, beyond the reach of violence.
You know I haven’t written much about Gaza. There are personal reasons for this. There’s also the fact that every time I’ve tried, I’ve stopped. I’ve failed. My words feeling woefully inadequate against the monstrous scale of what’s happening.
But watching doctors and nurses disappear, watching emergency responders shot in the head, watching hospital wards stripped and maternity units left to rot – I realised, with regret, my silence was becoming complicity.
Just yesterday I’d been in meetings with nurses, had a quick catch-up coffee with a doctor I’ve known for years after running into him getting lunch between surgeries. And last night I watched my husband leave for his shift with his scrubs folded in his bag, packed alongside the 3 am dinner that I made him.
The idea that any of them could go into what is supposed to be a haven of safety to treat a patient and never come out again – not because of infection or burnout or a tragic accident, but because someone decided that healthcare itself was a legitimate target – goes beyond anything I really know how to process.
What’s happening to healthcare in Gaza is not just tragic. It’s not “collateral”. It is, in every sense of the word, a crime.
This is what a war crime looks like
Not the kind conjured up in courtroom sketches or UN briefings, but something bloodier. Quieter. More intimate. A doctor standing by a bed in the middle of a procedure, and suddenly there is no bed. No ward. No hospital. Only dust, flame, and silence.
Gaza’s hospitals have not just been hit – they’ve been eliminated. Pretty much the majority of Gaza’s 36 major hospitals has been struck. Maternity wards. Neonatal units. Theatres. The very places you are meant to go when the world ends have themselves become the epicentre of destruction.
Gaza: Doctors under Attack didn’t rely on sweeping claims. It methodically documented the pattern. Hospital after hospital. The same sequence:
Bomb.
Invade.
Detain.
Destroy.
At Al-Shifa, mass graves were found on-site after troops withdrew. Some of the bodies still wore surgical gowns. At Al-Aqsa Hospital, Israeli forces attacked the courtyard where thousands of displaced families had sought shelter in tents, with no warning given. At Kamal Adwan Hospital, medical staff were detained and the facility was systematically stripped of equipment before being abandoned as a shell.
There is no legal ambiguity or justification here. The Geneva Conventions are explicit:
Civilian hospitals organised to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.
That protection is absolute – not conditional on intelligence reports or military convenience. Even if combatants were present, flattening an entire hospital complex isn’t proportionate. It’s barbarism dressed up in bureaucratic speak.
But the scale of this barbarism extends far beyond hospital walls.
It’s not just the hospitals – it’s survival that’s under attack
The targeting of hospitals isn’t happening in isolation. It’s part of a systematic campaign that includes bombing aid convoys, attacking people queuing for food, and forcing mass displacement of civilians who have nowhere left to go. Human Rights Watch has documented at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises since October 2023 – even though aid groups had provided their coordinates to Israeli authorities to ensure their protection. None received advance warnings. At least 31 aid workers and those with them were killed or injured in these coordinated attacks.
You cannot in good faith tell me that this is the fog of war or tragic miscalculation. When you bomb a Médecins Sans Frontières convoy that’s been coordinated with your forces, then attack an UNRWA guest house whose coordinates you’ve been given, then strike a joint IRC and Medical Aid for Palestinians guest house that’s been registered in your system – you are not targeting combatants. You are targeting the most basic infrastructure that serves to keep people alive.
The goal is unmistakable: make survival impossible. At aid distribution sites, Israeli soldiers have been ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians seeking food. At least 549 Palestinians have been killed and over 4,000 injured whilst waiting for aid. One soldier described it as “a killing field” where “one and five people were killed every day”. Schools turned into shelters have been struck. Even the routes designated as “safe corridors” for evacuation have come under fire.
I want to be clear about something at this point – criticising the actions of the Israeli state is not antisemitism, just as criticising any government’s war crimes isn’t an attack on its people or their faith. Jewish voices worldwide have been among the most powerful in condemning these actions. This is about state policy, not identity. It’s about what governments do in our name, not who they claim to represent.
None of this justifies the October 7th attacks. What Hamas did was brutal, unforgivable, and an open wound in every sense. Hostage-taking is a crime. The massacre of civilians is a crime. These things can and should be said without asterisks or conditions.
The hospital attacks are horrific enough on their own. But they’re part of something larger and more systematic – a campaign that treats the basic needs of civilian life as legitimate military targets. That’s not just illegal under international law. It’s a profound moral failure that implicates anyone who remains silent whilst it happens.
The moral framework we’re abandoning
But if our horror at the October 7th attacks becomes a licence for our silence at the systematic destruction of hospitals, we’ve crossed a moral line we may never find our way back from.
You don’t fight terror by becoming terror. You don’t respond to atrocities by dismantling every moral framework we’ve built. And you don’t get to call it “self-defence” when you shoot paramedics in the head and bulldoze dialysis units.
Because this isn’t just disproportionate – it’s strategic. A systematic dismantling of healthcare as infrastructure, not collateral damage. A strategy designed to render survival impossible and make the work of care itself a punishable act.
The cascading effects are already visible. Dialysis patients dying because their machines were destroyed. Pregnant women giving birth in tents without pain relief. Children with diabetes going into comas because insulin supplies were cut off. The cardiac specialist who was killed left two million people with one cardiologist – meaning heart attacks that would be routine saves anywhere else become death sentences.
This is what the systematic targeting of healthcare looks like: not just the immediate casualties, but the slow-motion catastrophe that follows.
The sound of cowardice: when silence becomes complicity
I know I’m speaking from a position of relative safety here, thousands of miles from Gaza. But that distance doesn’t excuse silence when nobody in power seems willing to say this is wrong.
That’s been the most chilling part, perhaps. Not the violence alone – though that’s horror enough – but the way our institutions have contorted themselves into silence. The BBC refused to air this documentary, citing “impartiality”, as if there are two reasonable sides to the targeted obliteration of paediatric wards. They handed it off to Channel 4 rather than do their job – a cowardly abdication of responsibility dressed up as editorial neutrality.
Most damning of all is the selective outrage from those who should know better. Our Prime Minister – a former human rights lawyer who knows exactly what the Geneva Conventions say about hospitals – has spent months dodging clear condemnation. Yes, recently he called Israel’s assault “abhorrent” and “intolerable”, and joined France and Canada in calling for unimpeded humanitarian access and an immediate halt to the Rafah offensive. But where was this clarity months ago – when maternity wards were turned to rubble, when neonatal units were buried under ash?
A man who once built his career on international law now offers calibrated phrases about “volume and speed of aid”, even as dialysis patients die in tents and surgeons are shot on call. David Lammy, meanwhile, speaks of “sustainable ceasefires” whilst aid workers are gunned down queuing for food. These aren’t complex legal questions – they’re war crimes, committed in broad daylight, documented by their own soldiers.
This is unprecedented.
Not just the scale – the WHO has recorded nearly 700 attacks on Gaza’s health infrastructure since October 2023 – but the absolute moral void that’s followed. The studied apathy. The whataboutism. The complete and utter refusal from those in power to treat these actions with the gravity they deserve.
If you’d shown me the footage from Doctors Under Attack with the location redacted, I’d have assumed it was a war crimes tribunal exhibit. Not something broadcast in the present tense whilst our Prime Minister calls for “restraint on both sides”.
When even the places that heal are hit – what’s left to protect?
What’s left when the last place meant for safety becomes a site of slaughter?
What happens when the tools meant to heal – stitching wounds, easing pain, numbing fear – become the reasons you’re marked for death?
A hospital is more than concrete and corridors. It’s a social covenant – a collective promise that care should transcend politics and prejudice. It says:
If you ache, tremble, or bleed – come.
If you speak our language or none at all – come.
Here, we don’t ask who you are. We ask where it hurts.
The assault on healthcare goes beyond cruelty – it is sacrilege. A deliberate dismantling of the most sacred space we’ve built. When we destroy the places that heal, we don’t just take lives – we erode the very belief that life should be saved. Bombing a hospital isn’t just an act of war. It’s a message:
No one is safe. Not even here.
When I walk into the hospital I work in each day, this will sit heavy in the back of my mind – the knowledge that someone, somewhere, could decide our red signage, our open doors, our vow to preserve life, no longer matter. That we are not neutral. That our only crime is trying to keep people alive. That we are targets.
What’s happening in Gaza is a moral event horizon. Not just the attacks on hospitals – but the systematic campaign to make survival itself impossible. If we allow this to be normalised – if we allow medics to be murdered without outrage, aid seekers to be shot, schools to be bombed, and the basic infrastructure of life to become legitimate targets in the name of geopolitics – then we’ve declared that the rules no longer apply.
That nowhere is sacred. That sanctuary is a myth. And if that’s true, it won’t stop at Gaza. We don’t have to agree on everything. We don’t need to share the same politics.
But if we can’t agree that bombing hospitals, shooting aid workers, and criminalising care are wrong, we’ve lost our moral compass. Speak out, support humanitarian efforts, demand accountability – because silence is no longer an option.
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
More from East Anglia Bylines
