Healthcare Under Attack in Gaza and Lebanon: Press Conference and Visual Exhibit

On Dec. 21, as part of a campaign called "Not Another Child, Not Another Hospital," healthcare workers from Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area created a moving visual exhibit on the steps of the California State Capitol to highlight the atrocities and suffering occurring in Gaza and Lebanon, particularly the targeting of the healthcare systems and healthcare workers.

As Californian healthcare workers and providers, the participants called on California elected officials and healthcare leaders to "listen to their constituents and do whatever is necessary to end the violence on the healthcare infrastructure in Gaza."

The speakers included multiple doctors and healthcare workers who were on the ground in Gaza completing medical missions this past year.

The Healthcare workers demanded that California health care leaders issue statements demanding the following:
Stop bombing hospitals and attacking aid workers.
Call for the protection of children in Gaza and Lebanon.
Call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and an end to the ongoing genocide to allow health operations to resume.
Support a comprehensive and immediate embargo on weapons to Israel and divestment to stop the mass slaughter of civilians and destruction of healthcare.
Advocate for unrestricted humanitarian and medical access to Gaza.
Establish healthcare education and training at your institution for patient-facing staff to provide informed care to patients affected by war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

This exhibit and action comes after 1,151 healthcare workers have been killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) while they were performing their duties as doctors, nurses, and paramedics.

“As healthcare workers, it is our moral and ethical obligation to do all we can to protect our colleagues and healthcare infrastructure around the world," said Yesabel Perza RN, local critical care nurse and Sacramento chapter leader of Healthcare Workers for Palestine. "Israeli military operations have turned Palestinian and Lebanese hospitals and healthcare facilities into battlefields where healthcare workers and patients are being brutally targeted."

"We are calling on the leaders in healthcare nationally and globally to take an overdue public stand in defense of our colleagues, healthcare systems and to protect children. What is happening to the healthcare infrastructure in Gaza and now Lebanon is unprecedented, even for a genocide," Perza stated.

Other speakers at the event included Dr. Haleh Sheikholeslami, Family and Integrative Medicine Physician; Dr. Greg Shay, Pediatric Pulmonologist with NGO MedGlobal; Bridget Rochios, Certified Nurse Midwife and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner;and Lina M., DPT student.

"Practicing medicine in Gaza felt like working with one’s hands tied," said Dr. Haleh Sheikholeslami, "Diagnostic tools were scarce, and resources were painfully limited. Yet, Gaza’s healthcare workers displayed unwavering resilience. They risked their lives daily, enduring profound losses, all the while knowing they had no means of escape."

"When I returned home, I was greeted as a hero but I felt like an imposter. If a few weeks of service made me a hero, what does that make the healthcare workers of Gaza, who have endured over 400 days of unrelenting crisis? With many refusing to leave their patients despite knowing they would not survive?" she continued.

"Israel’s aggregation has not only starved, killed and maimed the people, it has led to a total healthcare collapse," Sheikholeslami stated. "The bombardment has led to destruction of hospitals with only 17 of the 36 hospitals in the whole of Gaza that are partially functioning currently according to the UN. Only 36% of the primary care clinics are operating and the UN just announced that Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world."

""Over 1750 healthcare workers have been killed so far in Gaza, 300 or so in prison and lately the last orthopedic surgeon in Northern Gaza was also targeted by a quadcopter. These acts are all in violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions agreements of International Humanitarian Law that protects health workers, hospitals and patients during armed conflict," she concluded.

Maram, Pediatric Speech Language Pathologist, and Lina's Father, read the names of martyred health care workers for 14 minutes, symbolizing 14 months of genocide in Gaza.

Maram, a Pediatric Speech Language Pathologist, read the poem: "We Teach Life" by Rafeef Ziadah, while Jamie read the testimony of Dr. Ali Tahrawi.

Below is the Poem "We Teach Life" by Dr. Rafeef Ziadah:

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response.
And I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions.
But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?
Pause.
I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza.
Patience has just escaped me.
Pause. Smile.
We teach life, sir.
Rafeef, remember to smile.
Pause.
We teach life, sir.
We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky.
We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies.
We teach life, sir.
But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits.
And just give us a story, a human story.
You see, this is not political.
We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story.
Don’t mention that word “apartheid” and “occupation”.
This is not political.
You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?
How about you?
Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun?
Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood.
But they felt sorry.
They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza.
So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject.
And these are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied.
And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead.
And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile “not exotic”, “not terrorist”.
And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead.
Is anyone out there?
Will anyone listen?
I wish I could wail over their bodies.
I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre
And let me just tell you, there’s nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this.
And no sound-bite, no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life.
No sound-bite will fix this.
We teach life, sir.
We teach life, sir.
We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.