Israel’s Weaponization Of Aid In Gaza Is Leading To Preventable Suffering, Doctors Say

Israel’s ongoing and widely condemned weaponization of life-sustaining aid like food and medical supplies is leading to preventable suffering and death in Gaza, according to health care workers desperately trying to save their Palestinian patients amid an obliterated health system.

A Wednesday report by Physicians for Human Rights warns that doctors are being forced to make life-or-death decisions for patients with normally survivable conditions because they don’t have the necessary medical supplies.

For the past 21 months, doctors and other medical staff in Gaza have been treating patients either killed or wounded from Israel dropping U.S.-made bombs. Patients also come from controversial militarized aid sites, where Palestinians say Israeli forces carry out daily massacres.

“Treatable injuries transformed into terminal harm,” PHR executive director Sam Zarifi said. “Volunteer medical professionals face systematic Israeli policies and practices that directly prevent them from caring for the wounded and sick in Gaza.”

Israel’s control over how much and what kind of aid enters Gaza has pushed the territory’s health care system to the brink, with no fuel to keep hospitals running, no milk or baby formula for newborns, no food for the severely malnourished, no medication for chronic conditions and, oftentimes, no anesthetics for traumatic operations.

“I heard her screams before I saw her, a tiny 7-year-old girl was wheeled in, screaming at the top of her lungs. That’s when I saw that half of her leg was missing,” Dr. Mike Mallah, who was deployed to Gaza in March 2024, said in the report. “She was grabbing in desperation at the physician next to her, pleading for anesthetics. We rushed her into the operating room, despite knowing that the anesthesiologist had no sedation medicine or anesthesia drugs for her pain.

“As she continues to wither on the stretcher, the anesthesiologist just starts singing to her softly, like a lullaby,” he continued. “He knows that’s all he can do to comfort her.”

Foreign medical workers who volunteer their skills in Gaza have spoken at length about the restrictive and arbitrary nature of both how many health care professionals can enter the territory and what supplies they can bring. Such restrictions have only intensified this year, with health care workers running out of basic items like gloves, gauze and antiseptics.

“I saw countless patients — mostly women and children — come in with traumatic injuries from airstrikes. I saw my colleagues make heart-wrenching decisions about who to save with their limited surgical supplies, medications and equipment,” Dr. Aqsa Durrani, a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) USA board member who recently returned from Gaza, said on Monday.

“Meanwhile, the supplies we needed were left sitting in trucks on the other side of the border, blocked by Israeli forces,” she continued. “And the cruelty didn’t stop there; I saw children whose burns wouldn’t heal because they were malnourished and didn’t have enough food to get well. I saw children who were crying not because they had been maimed in the violence but because they were unbearably hungry.”

The World Health Organization stated that 11 trucks of medical supplies entered Gaza on Tuesday to be distributed at various health facilities, although humanitarians argue that this amount is minuscule compared to what Israel needs to permit. Doctors also stress that medical supplies can only be so helpful when Israel continues to attack Palestinian families and deny them sufficient food — which leads to slow wound healing, an inability to find disease and succumbing to severe malnutrition.

“If you don’t get killed from being bombed, you would get killed from lack of medical care and lack of wound care,” a nurse who worked in Gaza and is anonymous for safety said in the PHR report. “If you don’t get killed from being bombed or lack of wound or medical care, you would die of lack of nutrition because in order for a wound to heal, you need good nutrition, good protein, good hydration. And they didn’t have that.”

Neither the IDF nor COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing aid deliveries, immediately answered HuffPost’s request for comment. Israel has previously maintained that its forces are firing “warning shots” at the militarized aid sites, and that it is allowing plenty of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.