How to Bomb a Hospital

A doctor's view

Apparently you knock first, with various “knock on the roof” bombs dropped around the hospital before dropping the big kaboom on top of the hospital itself. You also send a text telling the people in the hospital to leave the hospital because you plan to bomb the hospital, which of course the people can’t do because they’re “in the hospital.” The staff caring for them can’t leave the hospital because they’re responsible for the hospitalized. And in the case of Al Qudz Hospital, currently under evacuation-prior-to-bombing orders, there are 12,000 refugees, mostly women and children, huddled inside, fleeing the bombing that is everywhere around them, thinking the hospital is safe, because “surely they won’t bomb a hospital.”

Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian emergency-medicine specialist with a team of other medical professionals currently tying to get into the hospitals of Gaza, all of which are threatened with bombing. It’s not because the Palestinian surgeons need his expertise—over years of occupation, Palestinian surgeons have become “world experts in mass casualty events and these immense patient loads”—but to lend support in what Gilbert describes as “an avalanche of human suffering.”

According to the World Health Organization, over 136 health care facilities in Gaza have been the targets of bombing. 12 hospitals are already shut down either due to direct bomb damage or collapsing infrastructure. The Turkish hospital, Gaza’s only cancer facility, was recently bombed. Dr. Gilbert, who is in regular contact with colleagues at Gaza City’s largest hospital, Al Shifa, hears that all the medical staff there have fevers. They are not only exhausted, but the dreaded disease outbreaks predicted for a situation like this have begun. Surgeons are running out of clean water for washing wounds. Sewer pipes are blown and draining. Thousands have resorted to drinking what salty brackish water they can find, breeding such little lovelies as Shigella, Salmonella and Hepatitis. 2,000 people remain trapped under rubble,1200 of which are children.

Yesterday Dan Rather wrote an essay called Sometimes There’s Only Tragedy. The point seemed to be that though it’s awful about the human suffering in Gaza, there’s not much we can or should do about it. After all, “War is hell. Always.” Note his emphasis on ”always,” suggesting that both war and the hell it brings are natural forces, to be accepted and borne with meaningless gestures of sadness. Interestingly, the name of his newsletter is Steady. It’s an apt name as keeping things “steady” in the midst of daily atrocity against planet and people seems to be the point of the mainstream media’s daily gloss.

I am far more impressed by what Dr. Gilbert had to say. He refers to hospital staff who refuse the hospital evacuation orders as “moral compasses and lighthouses of hope,” and calls on “all people around the world to stand up and say we don’t accept this.” As for why he is trying to get into hospitals threatened with bombing, he answers, “to try and be a decent human being.”

May we all follow the doctor’s orders, however we can.