Gaza City: The Palestinian National Council (PNC) affirmed that the Israeli occupation forces’ targeting of Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City marks a new chapter in the systematic killing policy pursued by Israel against the Palestinian people, particularly in the embattled Gaza Strip.
According to Qatar News Agency, PNC Speaker Rawhi Fattouh said the daily killing, bombardment of pediatric medical facilities, the starvation of patients, and leaving them prey to disease without medicine or shelter are scenes that trace back to the eras of human depravity, now being perpetrated in plain view of the world’s cameras and under the cover of disgraceful, even complicit, international silence.
The ongoing barbaric aggression, which has extended to medical and humanitarian institutions, most notably the decimation of over 35 hospitals and healthcare facilities since the onset of the onslaught, unequivocally confirms that the Israeli occupation has crossed every conceivable red line, he stressed.
Fattouh highlighted that Israel has not been content with murdering Palestinians in their homes and along their displacement routes but has gone so far as to go after them even in hospitals, where life is suffocating and hope flickers out.
He went on to emphasize that the Gaza Strip has become an open-air laboratory for the collapse of moral values, where annihilation is being conducted in full view of those who once professed to champion human rights.
The deafening silence serves as a green light for the continuation of the massacres and amounts to the wholesale dismantling of what remains of the international justice system. The incidents unfolding in Gaza have no longer remained a conflict or military operation as declared, but rather a systematic scheme to depopulate the territory and efface the Palestinian people from geography and memory alike, he said.
Fattouh added that targeting hospitals is fathomable only within the context of a genocide that aims to efface life, voice, and the Palestinian existence, calling on the international community, chiefly the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC), to immediately act effectively to halt the onslaught on the Gaza Strip and hold the Israeli occupation leaders accountable for their unabated crimes.