Bernstein writes: "One of the most misreported stories of modern times is
the battle the Palestinian people have been waging against the longest
illegal occupation in modern history."
Doctor Mads Gilbert. (photo: AP)
Slaughter Through a Stethoscope
By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News
27 December 15
One of the most misreported stories of modern times is the battle the
Palestinian people have been waging against the longest illegal occupation
in modern history. Indeed, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the
corporate press is a stenographer for the State Department and Israeli
government and military sources. The Israeli war machine and its associated
PR operations expend huge resources to actively prevent human rights workers
and opposition voices from entering Israel, and then to discredit them if
they come to press or the public eye.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel laureate and one of the best known and most
respected leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement, was
prevented from entering Israel and the Gaza Strip to investigate a potential
massacre of Palestinian civilians in 2006. It took Tutu over two years to
finally get in. Richard Falk, noted legal scholar and formerly UN Special
Reporter on Human Rights for the Occupied Territories, was also prevented
from getting into Gaza to investigate potential war crimes in 2009, despite
the fact that he was a high official of the UN.
With this de facto and de jure censorship in mind, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a
self-described "political doctor" and practitioner of "solidarity medicine,"
started to keep a journal of his experiences as an emergency room doctor
during the last two massive Israeli attacks on the tiny Gaza Strip. In fact,
Gilbert has done emergency medical work in Gaza for the last 15 years, and
is the only Western medical doctor who worked clinically in Gaza's hospitals
during the last four Israeli attacks on Gaza (2006, 2009, 2012 and 2014).
Dr. Gilbert's day job is Medical Director, Clinic of Emergency Medicine,
University Hospital of North Norway and professor at the University of
Tromso (UiT), the Arctic University of Norway.
Journaling mass murder and chaos in Gaza
Dr. Gilbert's emergency room journals provide the substance for two
compelling books on exactly what it looked like from the ground in Gaza, as
the Israeli military lay siege to an entrapped population of over a million
Gazans. His first book, Eyes in Gaza, written with his colleague Erik Fosse,
was an account of their experiences at al-Shifa during Israel's deadly
assault on Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead" (December 2008 - January 2009).
His new book on the 2014 war, Night in Gaza, was released in June of 2015.
I spoke to the seasoned ER doctor during a recent visit to Northern
California, where he was a guest speaker at a benefit for the peace group A
Jewish Voice for Peace. Night in Gaza is set at al-Shifa Hospital, where Dr.
Gilbert was working during Israel's massive assault in the summer of 2014,
which killed over 2100 civilians, mostly women and children. Israel has
since banned Gilbert from re-entering the blockaded zone.
Gilbert goes to Gaza "because I want to be an objective medical witness to
the sharp edge of the Israeli military machine," he said, "and because our
sanitized mainstream media has turned into a lying machine for the Israelis.
It's not telling the truth, and it is distorting the realities. So I think
there is such a need for alternative voices, and the other narrative - the
narrative of the Palestinian people, which I try to tell through the
stethoscope, through the medical eye, and through my account of the
Palestinian experience."
Dr. Gilbert bristles in response to the claims that the Israelis bend over
backwards to avoid civilian casualties when they carry out their attacks in
Gaza, the most densely populated place in the world. "Let's look at the
numbers from the last UN report, the commission that was established by the
UN to investigate the last attack. If the Israelis, on the one hand, say
that 90% of their bombs hit the intended target, which they say all the time
... how do they explain killing 2,151 people, 551 of them children and 299
Palestinian women. How on Earth can you claim that you tried to avoid
civilian casualties, when you kill half a thousand children in 51 days?" he
asked.
Like so many critics of Israel, Dr. Gilbert is quick to point out how
disproportionate the casualties are when the massive Israeli military, with
an arsenal more powerful than most of the rest of the countries of the
Western world, faces off with the locked-down, mostly unarmed Palestinian
population living under a difficult occupation in Gaza. "Now, one Israeli
child was killed in the 2014 siege, that is one Israeli child too many,"
said Dr. Gilbert. "No Israeli children should get killed. Civilians should
not be attacked. I condemn any Palestinian attack on civilians, as I do with
Israeli attacks on civilians. But there is absolutely no question of the
disproportionality between the attacks from the Israeli army on the
Palestinian people in Gaza and the meager attempts from the Palestinian
people to defend their people. How can you say that you bend over to protect
the civilians when more than 50% of the Palestinian hospitals were damaged
from the breaking of glass and falling down of the ceilings, some completely
demolished, like the rehabilitation hospital, and the Rafah hospital," he
said. "How can you say that you protect the civilians when 60% of the
primary health care centers were destroyed and many of them had to close?
How can you say that you protect the civilians when 47 ambulances were more
or less destroyed? How can you say that you protect the civilians when more
than 100 health care workers were killed or injured? These numbers all from
the UN report."
And Dr. Gilbert believes that this is not collateral damage, not an
accidental killing of civilians, but rather a real attempt by the Israelis
to punish the Gazans for the slightest bit of resistance. "There is no doubt
in my mind, and I've seen this, that the Israeli attacks during the last
assault on Gaza were directed at the civilian population as well as against
the Palestinians trying to defend their people," said Gilbert. "More than
140 families had three or more family members killed in the same attack. It
was as if the Israeli army were trying to eradicate the DNA of the
Palestinian resistance. It was just horrible."
Dr. Gilbert has published scholarly papers in the prestigious medical
journal The Lancet on everyday life and medical care in the occupied
territories and in Gaza. He says nothing can compare to the brutality of an
Israeli attack on the Gaza strip. "What I mean by that is when you pound a
civilian neighborhood with tons of high explosives and one-ton aerial bombs,
and you know this is one of the most densely populated places on earth, you
know you are bound to kill civilians: old women, children, civilian men.
Whoever lives there, they cannot escape. There are no shelters in Gaza,
there is no safe haven in Gaza, there is no way to get out of Gaza because
of the siege."
Dr. Gilbert is very clear when he talks about war crimes and slaughters, and
he does not believe he is engaging in hyperbole. "When I say slaughter,"
said Dr. Gilbert, pausing for emphasis, "I actually base it on what I
saw.... You know the Israelis use the term 'We are mowing the lawn' when
they attack Palestinians in Gaza. But it is a slaughter. We saw it. We saw
the kids. I received families of four with children without heads, with
their heads shot half off. All killed. And I have no other word for it than
a slaughter of the civilians. They dropped leaflets to say they should run.
Where should they go? They did their knock on roof with the drone rockets
saying 'Leave this house, because we're going to bomb them.' Where should
they go? Out in the streets where the artillery shells are exploding? It's
almost impossible to describe this horrible feeling, this feeling of being
in Hell when you are exposed to the Israeli rage, the military machine. It
is so powerful and it's so small a territory that they're bombing, that this
huge civilian loss is unavoidable. Seventy percent of those killed on the
Palestinian side were civilians. Like in 2009, like in 2012, like in 2006.
And I have been working at Shifa hospital during the last four Israeli
attacks on Gaza. And it's been a mounting brutality. It's been a sharp
increase of the amount of shells, bombs and the types of weapons used."
Dr. Gilbert spent some time describing the kind of wounds they were treating
and the bloody chaos as dozens of shredded bodies were being brought into
the ER, many children missing body parts, some with their head completely
blown off. "We saw many shrapnel wounds last time, because of the character
of the attacks. It was a ground invasion. They shot a massive amount of
artillery shells against these residential areas. You know, these multiple
punctuations of the skin, with these small metal fragments from the castings
of an artillery grenade, which has a very heavy specific weight made to
cause maximum injury. These metal castings disintegrate in a swarm of
shrapnel that travels at very high speed. And you know the energy is half
the mass times the velocity to the second power. So the higher the speed,
the higher the weight, the greater the energy to destroy. It cuts through
your clothes, it cuts through your skin, your subcutaneous fat, through your
muscles and into the body cavities, the skull cavity, the chest cavity, the
abdominal cavity. And in there, these fragments will continue to move until
they have delivered all their energy. And they cut open blood vessels,
organs, and they break bones."
"So when you are exposed to this swarm of metal fragments," said Gilbert,
"there is a high risk that you will have many bleedings, many disturbed
organs and blood vessels, and you have, of course, terrible pain, but you
bleed to death within a limited amount of time, depending on the largeness
of these shrapnel. Also, people came in with limbs cut off, more or less
completely, because some of the shrapnel are larger like a knife. There was
a lot of crushing injuries from buildings just collapsing from the
bombardment."
"Do I believe that Israelis are killing innocents on purpose? You have to
ask the Israelis if they are killing innocent civilians on purpose," said
the outraged ER doctor. "But you know they have the coordinates for every
single building in Gaza. They know exactly who is living where. They know
exactly which phone numbers to call. There is not a centimeter of Gaza that
they haven't mapped and recorded, and they know the purpose of the
building," said Gilbert, "so, you know, they know what they are bombing."
Dr. Gilbert recalled one terrible moment that stands out above the rest in
terms of abject violence. It was the Israeli attack on Shejaiya on July 20,
2014. He said, "The brutal and deadly massacre also demonstrated the Israeli
military pattern and practice of bombing ambulances and targeting emergency
medical workers who were clearly identified as such. The morning of the
Shejaiya massacre, we heard screams from the disaster reception area, the
emergency room. And an ambulance came wheeling in ... a young Palestinian
paramedic who had been killed in Shejaiya, in his uniform, in his ambulance,
together with a journalist and patients on board. The ambulance was one of
the 47 ambulances targeted by the Israeli army, and all on board were
killed. The paramedic was married. He had a small girl of four years, I
think. And, of course, it was extremely painful to see this fighter for
justice, this health worker, risking his life to save his people being so
mercilessly killed in his uniform, on call. And it reminded me of the
helplessness you feel, when this mighty power disregards international law,
disregards the Geneva Conventions and has the world's superpower number one,
the US, the United States of America, to support it continuously. President
Obama knew from hour to hour what was going on. They knew the numbers of
killed, from day to day, from hour to hour. They knew from the satellite
pictures what kind of buildings the Israelis were bombing. They bombed 220
schools."
Dr. Gilbert said he continues to do the work, because someone has to bear
witness to the killing and try to blow the whistle for the rest of the world
to take notice. "I feel a duty to side with the Palestinian people. I think
we should all remember the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, who says that if
you, in a situation of oppression, maintain a position of neutrality, you
always end on the side of the oppressor. I don't want to be on the side of
the occupier."
And then there were the scores of drones, weaponized and otherwise, "that
hunted Gazans 24-7, where they slept," Dr. Gilbert said, "where they worked
and ate, at schools, in hospitals - Gazans were vulnerable at all times.
You'd hear the drones around the clock. One, two, three, four ... you hear
the humming. Some of them are surveillance drones; some of them carry
hell-fire rockets, or spike rockets. You don't know when you'll be tracked."
"There was one night I was walking because I was going to where I lived," he
recalled, "just across the street from Shifa, to pick up some stuff, and to
change my clothes. And suddenly I heard the drone above my head and I felt,
you know, they've probably spotted me. I'm all alone in the street. The
streets of Gaza were completely deserted, because it was so dangerous to be
outside. And I got this completely choking feeling of being targeted. And I
felt they're going to hit me now. And the next thought was, of course, to
try to imagine what it means to be a Palestinian child living in Gaza."
________________________________________
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Doctor Mads Gilbert. (photo: AP)
http://www.readersupportednews.org/http://www.readersupportednews.org/
Slaughter Through a Stethoscope
By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News
27 December 15
ne of the most misreported stories of modern times is the battle the
Palestinian people have been waging against the longest illegal occupation
in modern history. Indeed, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the
corporate press is a stenographer for the State Department and Israeli
government and military sources. The Israeli war machine and its associated
PR operations expend huge resources to actively prevent human rights workers
and opposition voices from entering Israel, and then to discredit them if
they come to press or the public eye.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel laureate and one of the best known and most
respected leaders of the South African anti-Apartheid movement, was
prevented from entering Israel and the Gaza Strip to investigate a potential
massacre of Palestinian civilians in 2006. It took Tutu over two years to
finally get in. Richard Falk, noted legal scholar and formerly UN Special
Reporter on Human Rights for the Occupied Territories, was also prevented
from getting into Gaza to investigate potential war crimes in 2009, despite
the fact that he was a high official of the UN.
With this de facto and de jure censorship in mind, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a
self-described "political doctor" and practitioner of "solidarity medicine,"
started to keep a journal of his experiences as an emergency room doctor
during the last two massive Israeli attacks on the tiny Gaza Strip. In fact,
Gilbert has done emergency medical work in Gaza for the last 15 years, and
is the only Western medical doctor who worked clinically in Gaza's hospitals
during the last four Israeli attacks on Gaza (2006, 2009, 2012 and 2014).
Dr. Gilbert's day job is Medical Director, Clinic of Emergency Medicine,
University Hospital of North Norway and professor at the University of
Tromso (UiT), the Arctic University of Norway.
Journaling mass murder and chaos in Gaza
Dr. Gilbert's emergency room journals provide the substance for two
compelling books on exactly what it looked like from the ground in Gaza, as
the Israeli military lay siege to an entrapped population of over a million
Gazans. His first book, Eyes in Gaza, written with his colleague Erik Fosse,
was an account of their experiences at al-Shifa during Israel's deadly
assault on Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead" (December 2008 - January 2009).
His new book on the 2014 war, Night in Gaza, was released in June of 2015.
I spoke to the seasoned ER doctor during a recent visit to Northern
California, where he was a guest speaker at a benefit for the peace group A
Jewish Voice for Peace. Night in Gaza is set at al-Shifa Hospital, where Dr.
Gilbert was working during Israel's massive assault in the summer of 2014,
which killed over 2100 civilians, mostly women and children. Israel has
since banned Gilbert from re-entering the blockaded zone.
Gilbert goes to Gaza "because I want to be an objective medical witness to
the sharp edge of the Israeli military machine," he said, "and because our
sanitized mainstream media has turned into a lying machine for the Israelis.
It's not telling the truth, and it is distorting the realities. So I think
there is such a need for alternative voices, and the other narrative - the
narrative of the Palestinian people, which I try to tell through the
stethoscope, through the medical eye, and through my account of the
Palestinian experience."
Dr. Gilbert bristles in response to the claims that the Israelis bend over
backwards to avoid civilian casualties when they carry out their attacks in
Gaza, the most densely populated place in the world. "Let's look at the
numbers from the last UN report, the commission that was established by the
UN to investigate the last attack. If the Israelis, on the one hand, say
that 90% of their bombs hit the intended target, which they say all the time
... how do they explain killing 2,151 people, 551 of them children and 299
Palestinian women. How on Earth can you claim that you tried to avoid
civilian casualties, when you kill half a thousand children in 51 days?" he
asked.
Like so many critics of Israel, Dr. Gilbert is quick to point out how
disproportionate the casualties are when the massive Israeli military, with
an arsenal more powerful than most of the rest of the countries of the
Western world, faces off with the locked-down, mostly unarmed Palestinian
population living under a difficult occupation in Gaza. "Now, one Israeli
child was killed in the 2014 siege, that is one Israeli child too many,"
said Dr. Gilbert. "No Israeli children should get killed. Civilians should
not be attacked. I condemn any Palestinian attack on civilians, as I do with
Israeli attacks on civilians. But there is absolutely no question of the
disproportionality between the attacks from the Israeli army on the
Palestinian people in Gaza and the meager attempts from the Palestinian
people to defend their people. How can you say that you bend over to protect
the civilians when more than 50% of the Palestinian hospitals were damaged
from the breaking of glass and falling down of the ceilings, some completely
demolished, like the rehabilitation hospital, and the Rafah hospital," he
said. "How can you say that you protect the civilians when 60% of the
primary health care centers were destroyed and many of them had to close?
How can you say that you protect the civilians when 47 ambulances were more
or less destroyed? How can you say that you protect the civilians when more
than 100 health care workers were killed or injured? These numbers all from
the UN report."
And Dr. Gilbert believes that this is not collateral damage, not an
accidental killing of civilians, but rather a real attempt by the Israelis
to punish the Gazans for the slightest bit of resistance. "There is no doubt
in my mind, and I've seen this, that the Israeli attacks during the last
assault on Gaza were directed at the civilian population as well as against
the Palestinians trying to defend their people," said Gilbert. "More than
140 families had three or more family members killed in the same attack. It
was as if the Israeli army were trying to eradicate the DNA of the
Palestinian resistance. It was just horrible."
Dr. Gilbert has published scholarly papers in the prestigious medical
journal The Lancet on everyday life and medical care in the occupied
territories and in Gaza. He says nothing can compare to the brutality of an
Israeli attack on the Gaza strip. "What I mean by that is when you pound a
civilian neighborhood with tons of high explosives and one-ton aerial bombs,
and you know this is one of the most densely populated places on earth, you
know you are bound to kill civilians: old women, children, civilian men.
Whoever lives there, they cannot escape. There are no shelters in Gaza,
there is no safe haven in Gaza, there is no way to get out of Gaza because
of the siege."
Dr. Gilbert is very clear when he talks about war crimes and slaughters, and
he does not believe he is engaging in hyperbole. "When I say slaughter,"
said Dr. Gilbert, pausing for emphasis, "I actually base it on what I
saw.... You know the Israelis use the term 'We are mowing the lawn' when
they attack Palestinians in Gaza. But it is a slaughter. We saw it. We saw
the kids. I received families of four with children without heads, with
their heads shot half off. All killed. And I have no other word for it than
a slaughter of the civilians. They dropped leaflets to say they should run.
Where should they go? They did their knock on roof with the drone rockets
saying 'Leave this house, because we're going to bomb them.' Where should
they go? Out in the streets where the artillery shells are exploding? It's
almost impossible to describe this horrible feeling, this feeling of being
in Hell when you are exposed to the Israeli rage, the military machine. It
is so powerful and it's so small a territory that they're bombing, that this
huge civilian loss is unavoidable. Seventy percent of those killed on the
Palestinian side were civilians. Like in 2009, like in 2012, like in 2006.
And I have been working at Shifa hospital during the last four Israeli
attacks on Gaza. And it's been a mounting brutality. It's been a sharp
increase of the amount of shells, bombs and the types of weapons used."
Dr. Gilbert spent some time describing the kind of wounds they were treating
and the bloody chaos as dozens of shredded bodies were being brought into
the ER, many children missing body parts, some with their head completely
blown off. "We saw many shrapnel wounds last time, because of the character
of the attacks. It was a ground invasion. They shot a massive amount of
artillery shells against these residential areas. You know, these multiple
punctuations of the skin, with these small metal fragments from the castings
of an artillery grenade, which has a very heavy specific weight made to
cause maximum injury. These metal castings disintegrate in a swarm of
shrapnel that travels at very high speed. And you know the energy is half
the mass times the velocity to the second power. So the higher the speed,
the higher the weight, the greater the energy to destroy. It cuts through
your clothes, it cuts through your skin, your subcutaneous fat, through your
muscles and into the body cavities, the skull cavity, the chest cavity, the
abdominal cavity. And in there, these fragments will continue to move until
they have delivered all their energy. And they cut open blood vessels,
organs, and they break bones."
"So when you are exposed to this swarm of metal fragments," said Gilbert,
"there is a high risk that you will have many bleedings, many disturbed
organs and blood vessels, and you have, of course, terrible pain, but you
bleed to death within a limited amount of time, depending on the largeness
of these shrapnel. Also, people came in with limbs cut off, more or less
completely, because some of the shrapnel are larger like a knife. There was
a lot of crushing injuries from buildings just collapsing from the
bombardment."
"Do I believe that Israelis are killing innocents on purpose? You have to
ask the Israelis if they are killing innocent civilians on purpose," said
the outraged ER doctor. "But you know they have the coordinates for every
single building in Gaza. They know exactly who is living where. They know
exactly which phone numbers to call. There is not a centimeter of Gaza that
they haven't mapped and recorded, and they know the purpose of the
building," said Gilbert, "so, you know, they know what they are bombing."
Dr. Gilbert recalled one terrible moment that stands out above the rest in
terms of abject violence. It was the Israeli attack on Shejaiya on July 20,
2014. He said, "The brutal and deadly massacre also demonstrated the Israeli
military pattern and practice of bombing ambulances and targeting emergency
medical workers who were clearly identified as such. The morning of the
Shejaiya massacre, we heard screams from the disaster reception area, the
emergency room. And an ambulance came wheeling in ... a young Palestinian
paramedic who had been killed in Shejaiya, in his uniform, in his ambulance,
together with a journalist and patients on board. The ambulance was one of
the 47 ambulances targeted by the Israeli army, and all on board were
killed. The paramedic was married. He had a small girl of four years, I
think. And, of course, it was extremely painful to see this fighter for
justice, this health worker, risking his life to save his people being so
mercilessly killed in his uniform, on call. And it reminded me of the
helplessness you feel, when this mighty power disregards international law,
disregards the Geneva Conventions and has the world's superpower number one,
the US, the United States of America, to support it continuously. President
Obama knew from hour to hour what was going on. They knew the numbers of
killed, from day to day, from hour to hour. They knew from the satellite
pictures what kind of buildings the Israelis were bombing. They bombed 220
schools."
Dr. Gilbert said he continues to do the work, because someone has to bear
witness to the killing and try to blow the whistle for the rest of the world
to take notice. "I feel a duty to side with the Palestinian people. I think
we should all remember the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, who says that if
you, in a situation of oppression, maintain a position of neutrality, you
always end on the side of the oppressor. I don't want to be on the side of
the occupier."
And then there were the scores of drones, weaponized and otherwise, "that
hunted Gazans 24-7, where they slept," Dr. Gilbert said, "where they worked
and ate, at schools, in hospitals - Gazans were vulnerable at all times.
You'd hear the drones around the clock. One, two, three, four ... you hear
the humming. Some of them are surveillance drones; some of them carry
hell-fire rockets, or spike rockets. You don't know when you'll be tracked."
"There was one night I was walking because I was going to where I lived," he
recalled, "just across the street from Shifa, to pick up some stuff, and to
change my clothes. And suddenly I heard the drone above my head and I felt,
you know, they've probably spotted me. I'm all alone in the street. The
streets of Gaza were completely deserted, because it was so dangerous to be
outside. And I got this completely choking feeling of being targeted. And I
felt they're going to hit me now. And the next thought was, of course, to
try to imagine what it means to be a Palestinian child living in Gaza."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
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