Doctors Without Borders called for pressure on Israel to stop the “indiscriminate killing of civilians” in Gaza and facilitate the delivery of aid to those in need, and accused Tel Aviv of committing “comprehensive massacres” in the Strip.
This came during a press conference in Amman by the head of the organization’s media office in the Middle East and North Africa, Enas Abu Khalaf.
The organization said, “Israel must immediately stop the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza, and accelerate the facilitation of the delivery of aid to alleviate the suffering inside the Strip, including opening vital border crossings.”
Abu Khalaf criticized “the shameful inaction of the international community, as Israel’s allies continued for an entire year to provide it with military support and legal cover, while children were killed en masse, Israeli tanks fired on shelters in non-conflict zones, and Israeli fighter jets bombed humanitarian areas.”
Israel is launching a military response to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which has been ongoing for a year and has so far resulted in the deaths of about 42,000 people in the Gaza Strip, most of them women and children, according to Ministry of Health figures.
Abu Khalaf said, during the press conference, that “only 17 hospitals are operating partially today in the Gaza Strip out of 36 hospitals as a result of Israel’s systematic dismantling of the health system.”
She added that Israel “directly opened fire on health facilities and medical staff and killed many of them. It also raided facilities and began to arbitrarily arrest medical staff, and 6 of our colleagues in Doctors Without Borders were killed while performing their medical and humanitarian tasks.”
Abu Khalaf summarized the organization’s demands as “implementing an immediate and sustainable ceasefire, stopping the mass killing of civilians immediately, stopping the destruction of the health care system and civilian infrastructure, and ending the siege of Gaza.”
For her part, the organization’s president, Isabelle Defourny, said via video call during the conference, “What is particularly shocking is the hypocrisy and duplicity of Israel’s allies.”
She explained, “On the one hand, they vaguely condemn the consequences of the war on the residents of Gaza, while they continue to support Israel unconditionally, including providing some of them with weapons.”
She pointed out that Western countries “have been very keen in recent years to condemn alleged war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide, for example with the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Yazidis in Iraq, have refrained from using such language to talk about the Palestinians in Gaza.”