As head of Gaza’s ambulance service, Hani al-Jaafarawi had one of the most difficult tasks in the context of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. Even before October 7, his staff was already overworked and under constant threat. After the war began, al-Jaafarawi was involved in the medical response.
Hospitals, clinics and all health facilities were under extreme threat and al-Jaafarawi’s life was on the line every day. But on June 23, the situation changed when Israeli forces attacked the Daraj health clinic in Gaza City, killing him and four other civilians. His only crime was his dedication to the civilian defense of the besieged population of Gaza.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, he is the 500th health worker killed in Gaza.
The assassination of al-Jaafarawi is part of a systematic campaign by Israel to destroy public services in Gaza. Israel has deliberately targeted and killed medical personnel, members of the Palestinian Civil Defense, ambulance workers, rescue teams, police forces, civil engineers, utility workers, aid convoy drivers and civil society leaders in an attempt to create chaos and anarchy in Gaza and demoralize the population.
The official justification used by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) for the targeted assassinations of these professionals is that they are affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) because they work for government institutions in Gaza.
This reasoning is fallacious. Working under a government does not mean that one adheres to its political agenda or is a member of the political party that leads it. We cannot assume that all Israelis employed by the Israeli state support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes. Why should we assume anything about Palestinian officials and their political sympathies?
International law clearly distinguishes between combatants and civilians, and the political views of the latter make no difference. This is another aspect of the international legal regime that Israel is wilfully ignoring.
Two days before al-Jaafarawi’s murder, an Israeli airstrike killed four municipal workers and a passerby in downtown Gaza City. The workers were preparing to repair pipes to restore water supplies. Water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Israeli occupation forces, as the deprivation of this basic service has led to massive suffering and the spread of disease among Palestinians, which, of course, furthers Israel’s genocidal designs.
Efforts by engineers and communications professionals to end the Israeli-imposed internet blackout in Gaza have also repeatedly resulted in deaths. In January, an Israeli tank attacked a team sent to repair a switchboard generator in Khan Younis, killing two of them. This was despite the fact that they had coordinated their movements and the task for which they had been sent with the Israeli occupation forces.
The Israeli military has also repeatedly targeted health facilities and medical personnel, killing or kidnapping some of Gaza’s top medical specialists and hospital administrators. According to the United Nations, as of August, 885 health workers had been killed in Gaza.
Some were targeted in their homes and others in hospitals where they had remained to treat patients during the raids by Israeli forces. Others were tortured to death, such as Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, chief orthopedic surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, and Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
The decimation of the health sector in Gaza and the massacres of doctors and other health professionals mean that Palestinians do not have access to adequate health care, whether they are chronically ill, newly infected with a disease, or injured by Israel’s relentless bombardment. This is once again contributing to the Israeli genocide.
As many videos of the aftermath of airstrikes show, the wounded are usually transported to inadequate and failing medical facilities, where they lie on the ground in a pool of blood, while the few medical personnel available struggle to provide emergency care. Many of those who could have been saved die.
Israel’s massive destruction of all the public services that sustain life in Gaza has brought the Palestinian population to the brink. A neighbor in Khan Younis refugee camp recently wrote to me: “(The Israelis) left behind no sewage pipes, no water pipes, no water desalination plant, no bakery, no communication tower, no house. They crushed greenhouses and trees, they bombed mosques and schools. They bombed everything and anything. Total destruction. We are all targets and no one is safe. No doctor, no university professor, no child, no woman, no lawyer, no journalist and no place or facility – UN or otherwise – is safe. They tell us that we must leave Gaza if we want to stay alive.”
Israel’s goal in removing all semblance of civil order and public services is, of course, to sow despair among Palestinians and prevent them from resisting occupation, subjugation and dispossession. But this strategy is doomed to failure for two reasons: because it violates international law and because it is ineffective.
Israel has long ignored and violated the international legal regime. But what it is doing now in Gaza is difficult to defend, even for its most ardent supporters. In January, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “plausibly” genocidal. In May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, asked the court to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes committed in Gaza.
In June, an independent UN inquiry concluded that Israel had committed crimes against humanity during the war. The UN Commission of Inquiry, which conducted the investigation, said in its report: “The significant number of civilian casualties in Gaza and the widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure are the inevitable result of a strategy undertaken with the intention of causing maximum damage, in disregard of the principles of distinction, proportionality and adequate precautions.”
While Israel commits war crimes by destroying Gaza’s infrastructure and civilian services and killing the people who maintain them, these actions will not achieve the long-term goal of forcing the Palestinians to capitulate and give up their claims to their homeland.
For 11 months, the most powerful army in the region and one of the most advanced in the world has failed to achieve a military victory against an armed resistance group – unless one counts the massacre of civilians, mainly women and children, and the total destruction of their livelihoods as a measure of success.
In a June article in Foreign Affairs magazine, political scientist Robert A. Pape argued that Israel had in many ways “made its enemy stronger” than it was before the Oct. 7 attacks, because it made it more popular and, therefore, more effective at recruiting.
In a later interview, Pape asserted that the Israeli strategy of using overwhelming air power is a failure, just as similar approaches failed in Vietnam and Iraq. Overwhelming firepower tends to bring civilian populations together in mutual solidarity against the enemy. That is what is happening in Gaza now.
Israel has indiscriminately bombed Gaza to make it unlivable and to force the Palestinians into a mass exodus under threat of death. The toll of this operation is incalculable for the people of Gaza.
But Israel’s attempts to destroy the social fabric of Palestinian society, to erase its institutions and crush its spirit ultimately fail. This is because the people of Gaza, supported by their international allies, respond to this erasure with collective acts of defiance, struggling by all means to maintain public services, health and education services, and community life.
The recent reopening of a small emergency department at al-Shifa Hospital is emblematic of this enduring resilience. Such efforts demonstrate not only the courage of Palestinian officials, but also the global network of support and the immense mobilization of the Palestinian diaspora and its allies around the world.
This resistance to policies and acts of erasure is deeply rooted in the history of Palestinian resistance, expressed in both words and deeds. The last time I spoke to my niece, Amal, shortly after she turned 18, I asked her what her birthday wish was. She responded by reciting an excerpt from the great Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s work, A Call of the Land, which captures the Palestinian spirit:
I ask for nothing more than
die in my country,
dissolve and merge with the grass,
give life to a flower
that a child from my country will choose.
All I ask is to stay in my country,
like the ground,
grass,
a flower.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.