British Surgeon Describes Children Suffering “Appalling Injuries” in Gaza, Demands Immediate Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
March 21, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/21/ ... transcript
We speak with British surgeon Dr. Nick Maynard, who recently led an emergency medical team at Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital, about Israel’s ongoing attacks on healthcare infrastructure and the worsening humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory, where Israel’s brutal assault has killed about 32,000 Palestinians since October 7. Maynard is part of a group of international doctors with experience in Gaza who met with officials at the United Nations and in Washington, D.C., this week to express alarm over civilian suffering. Medical workers in Gaza are “working under extremely challenging conditions with a huge lack of resources and working in a healthcare system that is being systematically dismantled by the attacks on it,” he tells Democracy Now! “It’s very, very clear to all of us who have been on the ground in Gaza that the only way to try and stop this humanitarian catastrophe is for an immediate ceasefire.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel’s assault on Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, has entered a fourth day. Al Jazeera is reporting Israel has blown up the entire specialist surgery center at the hospital, where thousands of Palestinians had sought refuge and medical care. Israel has now ordered everyone to evacuate as it threatens to blow up the entire medical complex. The World Health Organization says it has documented 410 attacks on healthcare facilities since Israel began its assault on October 7th.
We begin today’s show looking at the collapse of Gaza’s medical system. A group of international doctors who recently spent time in Gaza traveled to the United Nations and Washington this week to express alarm over the humanitarian crisis. This is Amber Alayyan with Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday.
DR. AMBER ALAYYAN: Two populations are particularly vulnerable. Pregnant and lactating women, who were already facing iron deficiency anemia before the war, which puts them at risk for hemorrhage during birth, with the war, it puts them in a state of undernourishment or malnutrition, potentially malnutrition, which means that they can’t breastfeed their children properly. The milk doesn’t necessarily come in, and it’s definitely not enough. And the other population is children under 2 years, which is the breastfeeding age.
There’s not enough space for us to work closely with the mothers to help them start lactating again. We can’t even access them. And to be able to do that, you have to have day-to-day activities with those women, and that is not something that’s possible for us right now. Those children need to be breastfed. If they can’t be breastfed, they need formula. To have formula, you need clean water. None of these things are possible. What we’re talking about is women who are squeezing fruits, dates into handkerchiefs, into tissues, and feeding — drip-feeding their children with some sort of sugary substance to nourish them.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Dr. Amber Alayyan of Médecins Sans Frontières. Dr. Zaher Sahloul, the president of MedGlobal, also spoke at the United Nations on Tuesday.
DR. ZAHER SAHLOUL: This is Hiyam Abu Khader. She’s 7 years old. She is one of the victims of the war in Gaza. A bomb hit her family home, so her father and brother were killed. And her mother also was injured, and she had burns. And she sustained third-degree burns on 40% of her body. She was treated by one of our volunteers, Dr. Vanita Gupta, who is a critical care specialist from New York, in the European Hospital in Deir al-Balah. And Dr. Gupta took some videos of her, and you can see her face in the videos, and also in this picture. And if you want to define post-traumatic stress disorder, this is what post-traumatic stress disorder looks like in the face of a child who’s 7 years old. She was supposed to be evacuated to Egypt, and she waited for weeks before she was eventually evacuated, and she died two days after evacuation, because it was too late.
AMY GOODMAN: And professor Nick Maynard also spoke, a surgeon who led an emergency medical team in central Gaza at Al-Aqsa Hospital in December and January, former director for cancer services at Oxford University.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: I saw things at Al-Aqsa Hospital which I still wake up at night thinking about — appalling injuries in particularly women and children, the most devastating burns in small children. One child that I’ll never forget had burns so bad, you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that, but there was no morphine to give her. So, not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony.
AMY GOODMAN: And professor Nick Maynard joins us now, a surgeon who led the emergency medical team in central Gaza at Al-Aqsa Hospital in December and January, again, former director for cancer services at Oxford University.
Dr. Maynard, thanks so much for joining us from Washington. You were here in New York yesterday addressing members of the United Nations. Talk further about what you found, and talk about how it compares. You’ve been going to Gaza for, oh, the last 15 years.
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. Thank you very much for asking me on this morning.
As you said, I’ve been going to Gaza since 2010 and have worked extensively in various hospitals in Gaza. And each trip, it’s always very challenging. But there are circumstances we get used to. It’s what I describe as “normal Gaza” for people who have been there. It’s, of course, not normal by anyone else’s standards, because there’s always a lack of resources. You’re always wondering whether things are going to be running out. When you’re operating in the operating theaters, you always have to work with the equipment you’re given. It’s never quite enough. But, of course, you manage that very well.
What we’ve seen since October the 7th in the visits we’ve had to Gaza have been inestimably worse than that, and working under extremely challenging conditions with a huge lack of resources and working in a healthcare system which is being systematically dismantled by the attacks on it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Maynard, as you know, since you’ve returned, the situation has gotten immeasurably worse. If you could comment on the latest news about the sustained attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital? You said earlier, after your trip in January to Gaza, accusing Israeli forces of, quote, “appalling atrocities” as they systematically targeted hospitals and healthcare infrastructure in Gaza. So, if you could elaborate on that and what you hear of what’s been happening in the last few months since you left?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ve witnessed myself attacks on hospitals. When I was in Al-Aqsa Hospital, we were forced to withdraw two days early, because there was a missile attack on the intensive care unit.
What’s happening at Shifa Hospital now is really a replica of what happened in the earlier part of this war when Shifa Hospital was attacked and almost completely disabled. I have been in contact with a close friend who is a senior surgeon at Shifa to hear what’s happening in the last 48 to 72 hours. And the same thing is happening again. The hospital, which had been largely disabled, had been beginning to function again in recent weeks, and still at a much lower level than it had originally been capable of, but nevertheless the staff there heroically treating their patients with limited resources. But again, they’ve been forced to leave. I’ve heard horrific testimonies of the medical staff being stripped naked, some of them being abducted again. And we are seeing really the horrors that we witnessed several weeks ago. And Shifa Hospital, of course, being the largest hospital in Gaza, the major trauma center, now again will be almost completely disabled, and there will be no healthcare services for those patients in Gaza City and north Gaza.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, as you know, Dr. Maynard, the U.N. has said that none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are at this point fully functional. You described your own time working in Al-Aqsa in January as perhaps the worst experience in your medical career. We heard you speak a little bit about this earlier, but if you could describe the conditions under which you worked there and what you saw, the patients that you were seeing, you know, their injuries? If you could just talk about that?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes. We hear a lot about fully functioning and partly functioning hospitals in Gaza. I would argue there have been no fully functioning hospitals at all since October the 7th. The quality of care that I’ve witnessed in over the 15 years I’ve been going has been quite fantastic, some extremely talented doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers providing a remarkably high level of healthcare provision despite the really challenging lack of resources. But even though there is talk about fully functioning and partly functioning, I would argue that even Al-Aqsa Hospital, when I was working there, the Nasser Medical Complex, the European Hospital, before they were attacked by the Israeli forces, they weren’t fully functioning. They could barely cope — well, they couldn’t cope with the numbers of severe traumas coming in. And really, since October the 7th, no hospital facility has been managing to treat patients without trauma, all the communicable and noncommunicable diseases. So, I don’t think any hospital is functioning properly at all, and won’t do so until there is a cessation of the military activity.
When I was in al-Aqsa Hospital, we had very limited resources. I was operating most days — I’m a surgeon, so I was operating on major blast injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. I saw appalling injuries, mostly in women and children, but also in some men, as well. And we operated under very challenging circumstances. Some days there were no sterile drapes to use to cover patients, so we had to make our own out of gowns. Some days there was no running water, so we couldn’t scrub up properly. We had to try and sterilize our hands with alcoholic gel. The equipment we had to use in the operating theater was very limited, very limited numbers of sutures and needles to use, and very few instrument sometimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maynard —
DR. NICK MAYNARD: So, really — yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us more about that little girl that you described at the news conference you held at the United Nations with the other doctors?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes. This was a little girl who was managed by one of my close colleagues from Oxford, Dr. Debbie Harrington. It was a little girl with severe burns, whose burns were so severe that you could see her facial bones through the burns. There was no prospect of her surviving these burns, and we knew she was going to die. But there was no morphine available in the emergency room that day. And that was a frequent occurrence during our stay there. So, we knew she was going to die, but she had to die in agony. There was no way of relieving her pain.
And what made it even worse, if it could be worse than that, was the fact that there was nowhere for her to die in privacy. She was lying on the floor of the emergency room at Al-Aqsa Hospital. There was nowhere else for her to go. So she died in public and in agony.
And we witnessed many other examples like that, and I could spend a lot of time talking about the horrible things we saw, people dying without dignity, without pain relief. And I bore witness to things I would never, ever have expected to have seen in any healthcare setting.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maynard, can you talk about the condition of the doctors? A few months ago, we interviewed Dr. Hammam Alloh, who was at Al-Shifa, and he would later die in a bombing. I had asked him why doesn’t he leave, and he said, “Do you think that’s why I went to medical school? To desert my patients?” But can you talk about right now the number of doctors who have been arrested, who have died, who are hungry as they try to work?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yes. I’ve been profoundly humbled by the healthcare workers that I’ve met in Gaza, some of whom I’ve known for many years, some of whom I met during my stay at Al-Aqsa Hospital. They’ve been working nonstop under the most appalling conditions since October the 7th. I go out to Gaza with Medical Aid for Palestinians. They have some heroic staff on the ground there who, again, are working under appalling circumstances. One of them who lives in northern Gaza couldn’t move south because of his elderly parents. They’ve been living on birdseed. They’ve run out of animal feed now, so they’re now eating birdseed. I’ve met doctors and nurses who have been physically and mentally broken by what they’re going through, but still carry on working, refusing to leave their patients, because that is what their job is. None of these people have been paid at all since October the 7th, and, indeed, many of them hadn’t been paid for many months up 'til then. But they stay with their patients, because that is their job, that is their duty. And they will not leave, despite the full knowledge that they may die as a result of that. So, I am truly humbled by the people I've met there, both doctors and nurses and some very close friends I’ve made in Medical Aid for Palestinians who work on the ground there.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Maynard, I want to ask about another — a related issue, which is, you said that most of the people you treated were women and children. Now, of course, Gaza is on the brink of famine, and at least 27 children have already died of malnutrition as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid supplies. If you could talk about whether you already saw signs in January of the effects of insufficient food on the children that you were treating?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. You played earlier the very eloquent description by Amber about the problems with malnutrition in women and children. We saw this when we were there in December and January. We saw at Al-Aqsa Hospital the pediatricians who we knew there were seeing two or three cases a week in December of kwashiorkor. This is the most severe form of protein-deficient malnutrition. And you may remember pictures of the various famines over the years we’ve seen in Africa with potbellied children. And this is the most severe form of malnutrition. And the pediatricians were seeing this in Al-Aqsa back in December.
We saw evidence of — very clear evidence of malnutrition in some of our surgical patients in Al-Aqsa Hospital. Virtually all the patients get severe infective complications of their injuries in their surgery because of the conditions, the overcrowding, the lack of antiobiotics, the lack of sterile procedures. And, of course, when people get these infections, when they develop sepsis, that rapidly accelerates the malnutrition. And these people who were already on the brink of malnutrition then become rapidly malnourished. So, we saw that a lot.
And we called this out. When my colleagues and I returned from Gaza, we were very vocal about the worrying development of malnutrition. And, of course, all our fears have been realized. Now it’s reached the IPC, you know, Category 5 of malnutrition. There is a famine there. And these are people now, and patients and children, who don’t just need food, they need medical treatment for their malnutrition. And even if there were a ceasefire today, there would be many hundreds, if not thousands, of ongoing deaths from the severe malnutrition as a result of this man-made famine that we’re now seeing.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Nick Maynard, what is the prescription you are recommending right now, as you come to this country? You were at the U.N. Now you’re in Washington, speaking to lawmakers. What are you telling them? What do you say that President Biden should do?
DR. NICK MAYNARD: Yeah. We’ve had a terrific reception in New York and in Washington, and we really do believe people are listening to us. And we’re telling them as it is on the ground. We’re not politicians. We’re not lawmakers. We are humanitarians who are just describing the appalling things we have seen.
It is very, very clear to all of us who have been on the ground in Gaza that the only way to try and stop this humanitarian catastrophe is for an immediate ceasefire. There’s a lot of talk back in the U.K. and in the U.S. about how to get aid to Gaza. We can talk about the fact that, undoubtedly, the best way to get aid is over land rather than via airdrops or via sea corridors. But even if they open up the land borders, the crossings, to get the aid in, the distribution of aid within Gaza is virtually impossible with the ongoing military activity. And what is crucial is that aid gets not only to Gaza, but within Gaza easily, to get to all — particularly to northern Gaza, where we know there is now a famine. And so, my message is — our message is that there has to be pressure on the Israelis to stop — and Hamas — to have a ceasefire, so that that aid can be delivered throughout the whole of Gaza and humanitarian care and aid can start to work.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we know you have to get off to your first meeting today in Washington, D.C. Professor Nick Maynard, surgeon who led an emergency medical team in central Gaza at Al-Aqsa Hospital in December and January, former director for cancer services at Oxford University, thanks so much for being with us.
***
“Humanitarian Violence” in Gaza: Architect Eyal Weizman on Mapping Israel’s “Genocidal Campaign”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
March 21, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/21/ ... transcript
A new report by the research group Forensic Architecture counters Israel’s argument at the International Court of Justice that it followed humanitarian policies to safeguard civilian life in Gaza. South Africa argued in January before the ICJ that Israel was guilty of genocide during its war on Gaza. The report argues that what Israel says are humanitarian evacuations in Gaza actually amount to the forced displacement of Palestinians, which is a war crime. It found that since October 7, Israel has issued imprecise and sometimes contradictory evacuation orders, attacked people even in so-called safe zones and evacuation routes, and failed to provide the necessities of life for those civilians, all while pushing the population further and further south into areas that are then also attacked or evacuated at a later time. “We cannot see it as anything else but part of the genocidal campaign,” says Forensic Architecture director Eyal Weizman, who accuses Israel of using humanitarian principles as yet another weapon against Palestinians in Gaza. He says Israel’s objective is to “exercise pain on the civilian population” in order to deter “ongoing resistance to the Israeli occupation.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We look now at a new report published by the research group Forensic Architecture, which counters Israel’s argument at the International Court of Justice that it followed humanitarian policies to safeguard civilian life in Gaza. South Africa argued in January before the ICJ that Israel was guilty of genocide during its war on Gaza. The report argues that what Israel says are humanitarian evacuations in Gaza actually amount to the forced displacement of Palestinians, which is a war crime.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in London by Eyal Weizman, a British Israeli architect born in Haifa. He’s founder and director of Forensic Architecture, a professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He’s the author of several books, including Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation and The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence. He’s also a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and of the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Eyal, welcome to Democracy Now! As we come to air right now, the United States has presented a resolution to the U.N. Security Council for a temporary ceasefire. I’m wondering if you could respond to that and Netanyahu only speaking with Republicans, behind closed doors — now he might be addressing a joint session of Congress, if the House speaker decides to invite him — saying that Rafah invasion will happen.
EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah. If a Rafah invasion will happen, we will see the humanitarian disaster, the man-made humanitarian disaster imposed on Gaza, just aggravated to levels that we haven’t yet experienced. In Rafah, we have a huge part of the Palestinian people evacuated to living in inhumane conditions where there are famine and lack of basic humanitarian provisions, in something that is called a “safe zone.” And I think that it’s important to understand that there is no safe place in Gaza. Although Israel is designating part of the Strip as so-called safe areas and ordering the population to evacuate to them, it continuously imposes on these areas conditions that amount to unlivable conditions and in continuation of its genocidal policies.
So, what we need to — my comment to that is, rather than allowing any or entertaining any specific plans and provisions, you know, that the U.S. is discussing now with the Israelis about allowing them to attack Rafah under certain conditions, we need to see immediate ceasefire across the board in all places of Gaza, in order to allow for the rebuilding of the Strip, in order to allow for humanitarian provision to reach each and every Palestinian in the north and in the south.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Eyal Weizman, the proposal that the U.S. has put forth — this is before we turn to your report. The proposal that the U.S. has put forth for a temporary ceasefire is reportedly for the release of Israeli hostages and allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza. You wrote in a piece — I want to ask you about a piece you wrote for the London Review of Books in November in which you document — the piece is headlined “Exchange Rate,” where you document the change in Israel policy with respect to its hostages. So, if you could talk about the way that that’s played out? You wrote the piece in November. If you could talk about the way that’s played out, and how you think that might affect what happens now, going forward, with respect to the hundred or so hostages who remain, who are reportedly still alive?
EYAL WEIZMAN: I think that what you see in all negotiations around the captives and the Palestinian prisoners sitting in Israeli prisons, some of them on administrative detentions without charge, thousands of them, is that Israel has been creating and enlarging its bank of prisoners in order to create — in order to allow it to change the exchange rate. The title of that piece in the LRB was “Exchange Rate,” and it was looking at the history of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation through the capture of captives, from — really, from the famous airplane hijacks of the '70s all the way to the present, the way in which Palestinians forced Israel into — the only way that Palestinians could actually affect and release their prisoners is through capturing Israeli captives. Over the years, the exchange rate has changed favorably to the Palestinians. And what you're seeing is that Israel is now arresting people in order — Palestinians, again, and holding them in administrative detention, in order to beef up its bank of captives.
More than that, you could see that in the reports on the negotiation, the fate of those people that have been purportedly evacuated into safe areas is being brought into the equation. One way of thinking about it is to say, of course, Hamas or Palestinian factions in Gaza are holding over 100 Israeli captives, and Israel is holding close to 2 million Palestinian captives and bargaining for their return home in exchange for its prisoners. And that is obviously patently illegal, according to international law. And the fact that even that is being brought into the negotiation testifies that that was the intent of holding them away from their home as a bargaining chip towards that. So, you have an exchange rate now that is 200 million Palestinians displaced — sorry, 2 million Palestinians displaced, 100 Israeli captives, and this is really where the negotiations are going.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Eyal Weizman, let’s turn to your report, the Forensic Architecture report, which is headlined “Humanitarian Violence in Gaza.” If you could begin just by explaining — the two words don’t normally come together, “humanitarian” and “violence.”
EYAL WEIZMAN: Right.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: If you could explain what you mean by that? Of course, you’ve also written a book on this. And then lay out the three phases of mass displacement that you document in the report.
EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah. So, you know, we think about humanitarian principles — and part of them is international humanitarian law, so-called the laws of war — as being there to protect civilians. But a certain manipulation of international humanitarian law allows you to have operational advantage, or, in this case, advantage in negotiation over the captives in this particular way. So, there is a principle, an accepted principle, in international — in humanitarianism that if you want to evacuate a population into a safe zone, that safe zone needs to have several conditions. There needs to be proper medical care. There needs to be proper food and housing in these areas. Israel has evacuated — ordered the evacuation of Palestinians from within Gaza and from the north to the south into areas that were repeatedly under attack, into areas with no housing, no medical care, and now that we see no food is being provided in it, or very little, or not sufficient levels of aid within that. So, that is, firstly, you know, the kind of the principle of using a humanitarian principle that is purportedly used in order to save, in order to treat civilians and take them out of harm’s way, in order to achieve Israel’s operational objectives in this attack on Gaza, and that is to exercise pain on the civilian population to generate levels of destruction and harm that would deter Palestinians from ongoing resistance to the Israeli occupation.
And it’s becoming more and more clear that the harm, that the levels of destruction that we’re seeing, that the level of displacement that we’re seeing, are not the byproduct and not the collateral effects of this conflict, but really the only thing that Israel has achieved during that war. It hasn’t achieved any of its tactical aims. It hasn’t dismantled Hamas as an operative force. It hasn’t captured the Hamas leadership. It hasn’t freed hostages, except of in very rare situations. What it has done is create an equation in which the civilian population is being put in harm’s way in order to bargain against their return back to the north, to north of Gaza, in order to effectively achieve what tactically Israel has not achieved.
So, in relation to the stages, a week or so after the October 7th attack, Israel has given the entirety of the north of Gaza an evacuation order. They were ordered to leave the north of Gaza, home to over a million Palestinians, the center of Palestinian political, cultural life, was actually ordered to cross Wadi Gaza, which divides, according to them, Gaza into north and south. That was the first stage. And after the ceasefire, the temporary ceasefire in which some prisoner exchange was happening at the beginning of December, what Israel has done is releasing an interactive map online, dividing Gaza into kind of a gerrymandered 623 zones. It was very difficult, with people that we spoke to in Gaza, to understand whether they are in zone number 546 or 547. The map was extremely confusing. It was released online at a time of very frequent internet and power cuts, or it was communicated via leaflets that were unevenly distributed. It was an incredibly confusing system that led to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians from one zone to the other. So, when they were — after they were ordered to all move into southern Gaza, from different parts in the southern part of Gaza, they were ordered to go into different places.
And what the report is showing is the systematic and ongoing use of these evacuation orders were meant to achieve that population displacement and that people were continuously being put in harm’s way. The routes, the so-called safe routes, along which Palestinians were ordered to evacuate were attacked. Areas where they went to had no provisions and very often were attacked themselves. So, we cannot see that humanitarian policy, so-called humanitarian policy, of the Israeli forces — and the argument that the Israelis put forward in The Hague that, you know, they are not in violation of the Genocide Convention because they apply humanitarian principle, but we cannot see it as anything else but part of the genocidal campaign that is actually inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: And now, of course, if Netanyahu does succeed in a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah, they will go back to all these places they were forced to flee. And they talk about, “No worries, Palestinian civilians will be protected in these humanitarian zones.” Eyal Weizman, if you could respond to that? And also, just for people to understand, your organization is so unusual, and it also operates in several different countries, you yourself born in Haifa. If you could explain how you do what you do? We are also showing a series of maps, where you show the stages, one, two, three. You’ve done so many different investigations, from who killed Shireen Abu Akleh, the great Al Jazeera Arabic reporter — when Israel was saying caught in crossfire, you proved the opposite: She was killed by an Israeli sniper — among other things. Can you talk about what Forensic Architecture does, and what you, as an Israeli British architect, are doing in this kind of analysis — an architect?
EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah, thank you for asking that. Of course, the nature of the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, and throughout Palestine complete, makes use of architecture as part of the violence applied on Palestinians. So, starting from the location of settlements on hilltops in a way that divide the Occupied Territories, surveys it, bisect Palestinian-built fabric, the design of roads, the provisional infrastructure, you could say that settler colonialism is architecturally enacted.
In Gaza, obviously, we had settlements in Gaza up until 2005, when they were evacuated, but after that, the Gaza envelope is a system of civilian and military infrastructure that included a number of fences and earth berms and military facilities, as well as kibbutzim and moshavim. These are agrarian settlements that are part of what Israel always called its regional defense.
Of course, all that system was attacked on October 7th. So you could see how architecture is mobilized as part of the system of control and occupation of Palestinians. You could see why Palestinians would attack that system of infrastructure — and this is without commending and, of course, not supporting the killing and abduction of civilians.
But I think that architecture is a key part of that, of understanding the conflict, the long history of Israel’s settler colonization, and also understanding what is happening in Gaza now. It is happening in urban environment. And one has to understand what this urban environment, that has been created over the years of — you know, since, really, the Gaza Strip was created as a historical anomaly in 1948, when it was carved out as a kind of concentration area for refugees, becoming one of the densest parts of the world, most densely inhabited part of the world. How do you control population centers? And a lot of thinking was done from the Israeli side in terms of thinking about the control of Palestinians as an urban problem.
And what we see now happening in Gaza is the shaping of Gaza for, you know, the day after. Would it come now? Would it come in weeks, in months? We do not know. But what we see is Israel actually shaping the built fabric, destroying all homes and agricultural areas in a huge buffer zone along the border, creating east-west routes, not only the famous one that we know, around Deir al-Balah, but all throughout that very long and thin strip of territory, the Gaza Strip, we see it being truncated, almost cut like salami, with routes and military infrastructure that would be there in order to isolate and divide different parts of the Gaza Strip, if resistance continues, from the Palestinian parts.
And so, architecture — if architecture is really the means by which Israel exercises control, we, architects, and the organization that I run, Forensic Architecture, is — you know, has many architects working with us, but also open-source investigators, journalists, lawyers, etc. — we are monitoring things from a cartographic, spatial and architectural perspective. We work very closely, and we have a partner organization in Ramallah, the Al-Haq Forensic Architecture Unit, because we understand that working in Palestine, like working anywhere else in the world — Forensic Architecture has also got offices in Mexico, in Bogotá; now we’re starting one in Istanbul, in Athens, in many other places in the world. But understanding the lived reality, understanding the way that architecture is used as an oppressive mechanism requires also the lived experience — understanding the lived experience of people there. And therefore, when we’ve done that report that you mentioned, we’ve been in touch with — we’ve been in touch with Palestinians on the ground, we’ve been in touch with medical professionals, with doctors, in understanding the conditions in the so-called safe zones. And as I say, there are no safe areas in Gaza.
We’ve tried to understand the spatial logic of that campaign. And we could see that one of the main strategic tools for Israel to control and afflict that pain on Gaza is through the evacuation orders, and that they have been spatially designed — initially, again, dividing north Gaza from south Gaza, and then dividing it into 600 Tetris parts, if you like, in which, you know, you would get very a confusing order in which your number would come up, and you would be told to go from that number zone into another number zone. Do you get this message? Do you understand it? And also, on the way, you’d be attacked. And the zone in which you’re being evacuated to is itself unsafe and unlivable.
So, here what we see is the abuse of humanitarian principles to further Israeli genocidal campaign. And this is why we call that report “Humanitarian Violence.” We need to be very, very wary when we are speaking about humanitarian principles in war, because very often militaries — not only the Israeli militaries, but, you know, Western, Northern, global — militaries from the Global North, when they engage in urban warfare in parts of the Global South, they are applying humanitarian principles — they’re playing international law in a particular way that does not contain violence, that actually amplifies it.
I’ll give you another example for that: warnings. You know, you could think that to warn a population is actually something that could be very, very helpful. It could save lives. But, actually, the aims of these warnings, or what is implied in them — and sometimes explicitly mentioned — is that if you do not heed the warning, you would be considered potentially part of the armed resistance in a particular area. That means you get redesignated from a protected civilian to a nonprotected either voluntary human shield or part of a resistance, if you do not heed the warning. So, in a sense, with one legal tool, you created the redesignation of a big part of the population, and you basically let the blood in that way. So, humanitarianism, when it — those principles, when they’re using in such a brutal campaign, it could be actually part of the problem, rather than something that is moderating and defending civilians.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Eyal Weizman, if we could talk a little bit more about that? The scale, just to point out, just to give us a sense of the scale of the crisis of mass expulsions, at the moment, almost 70% of the total area of the Gaza Strip has been issued evacuation orders. If you could say, very quickly, in terms of the International Court of Justice ruling, what does your report suggest about the defense that Israel presented?
EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah, that the defense is completely inapplicable. We will show how — and we have shown how — Israeli military, the occupation forces, when they maneuver through — if you look at things in relation to each other, if you look at military maneuver, you look at areas that have been bombed, as we have, through speaking to people, through analyzing videos, through looking at satellite imagery, we have a good understanding, we have a good map of what are the areas that have been bombed. Overlay that with the so-called safe zones, overlay them with Israeli military maneuver, and what you see is, A, civilians are being evacuated into areas that have been bombed, that have no facilities, and are continuously bombing — they are still being bombed as Israel has ordered civilians into them. And you see, in some cases, Israeli military maneuver, Israeli invasion into the area it itself designated as safe zones.
So, in a sense, you see those categories operating in relation to each other as part of an overall strategy, rather than you’re seeing humanitarian principle pushing against military violence and moderating it. You see it has become one of the tools in the Israeli campaign toolbox to generate that level of destruction in Gaza. So, you know, you’re speaking about 70% of the area is being displaced. And the proportion —
AMY GOODMAN: Eyal, we have 10 seconds.
EYAL WEIZMAN: The proportion of people displaced is much higher, and the proportion of civilian infrastructure destroyed is almost complete. So, look at those things together and understand the militarization of humanitarian principles.
AMY GOODMAN: Eyal Weizman, we clearly have so much to talk about. We’d like to ask you to stay, and we’ll post Part 2 online at democracynow.org. Eyal Weizman is a British Israeli architect, founder and director of Forensic Architecture. We’ll link to the new report, “Humanitarian Violence: Israel’s Abuse of Preventive Measures in Its 2023-2024 Genocidal Military Campaign in the Occupied Gaza Strip.”