When the initial news of the executions of eight paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the disappearance of one more broke on Eid al-Fitr, I stared for a long time at the pictures of the men the Israel Defense Forces had killed. I have stared more every day since.
I knew some of these men.
I scan photos of my time in Gaza last year, looking for these men in my memories. I see them with patients, kneeling by the stretchers that acted as beds, dressing wounds, talking, reassuring. I see them loading patients into ambulances and driving off in the summer dust. I see them laughing, playing soccer on the tennis court.
Eight Palestinian paramedics, working under the auspices of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and with the full protection of their emblem, were killed by the Israel Defense Forces, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law, and indeed of the most basic sense of being human. They were killed and buried alongside six first responders from Gaza’s civil defence unit and a United Nations employee.
In April 2024 I was part of an emergency medical team delivering medical care in Gaza. At the request of the World Health Organization, our team worked with the PRCS at a trauma stabilisation point. What an honour that was. On a tennis court in Khan Younis, we worked from two tents – one for the PRCS and one for us – collaborating frequently and freely. We saw patients, treating those we could, and stabilising and referring elsewhere those we could not. Paramedics brought patients directly from places of frontline trauma and when stable they loaded them back in the ambulances and took them to where they hoped they could receive the care they needed. The PRCS clinicians I worked with in Khan Younis took far greater risks than any I have faced in a decade of work in conflict to provide life-saving medical care to their compatriots.
Returning home last year I wrote in the Guardian that “Israel poses a palpable, unprecedented risk to humanitarian and medical workers in Gaza”. The latest update from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that since October 2023 at least 409 humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza, and the number keeps rising. Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom was one of them. The anniversary of her death passed just days ago, and indeed far too quietly.
Medical humanitarian work, to me, is about both contributing to access to healthcare for people in areas of great need, as well as bearing witness to their suffering, in whatever is the manner required by the moment. In this moment I write to bear witness but not to the suffering of the Palestinian Red Crescent medical staff, for that you can read about yourself. Indeed, if you have not seen the egregious violence of Israel against healthcare workers and civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, you are not looking. No, I write to bear witness to the incredible nature of these men – to their love, their kindness, their gentleness and their goodness. We stop seeing people’s humanity very quickly in war of any description, and even more so in mass slaughter or indeed genocide. Erasure requires such forgetting.
I watched the men of the PRCS work hard and effectively. I sat with them between patients, listening to lyrical conversation and wondering at their upbeat spirts. In more private candid moments they would explain, what choice did they have? They needed to stay positive enough to be upright each day, to continue the work. They were tired, they were scared, but they continued.
We ate together. In the middle of a conflict zone with the austerity that resulted from Israel’s systematic blockades of supplies into Gaza, our colleagues in the PRCS fed us each day from their own kitchens. The people of the PRCS seem to give of an inexhaustible supply of goodness of their own selves.
Many of us engaged in medical humanitarian work are currently drowning in grief, in anger and in concern for any possibility of work in conflict going forward. Experienced humanitarian workers know that the deaths of our colleagues are not collateral damage from the routine business of war. War might have been foggy in the 19th century, but I can assure you it is not in the 21st. Israel has demonstrated its exceptional capacity for precision targeting. None with any power among us can afford to wait for a belated international criminal court or International Court of Justice process to say what we see with our own eyes. States must acknowledge the violations of the laws of war that Israel continues to perpetrate, and they must act accordingly.
A former-ICRC friend wrote on Instagram that “grief has lost its meaning”. We are all at a loss for words. Another wrote to me that “it is a huge challenge to honour their lives properly”. As I struggle to type, pulling words like teeth without anaesthetic, I feel the words of my friends with my soul and sinew. I can’t meet the challenge. Nothing I can say can ever adequately honour the men of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Instead, I write in sadness for the record.
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