Gaza: Healthcare System Support

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support the healthcare system in Gaza.

[Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we start the debate, I remind speakers that they have two minutes and ask them to please stick to that time. We have a lot of speakers to get through and we want to finish the debate on time. Thank you.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate sits comfortably on the back of the debate that we have just heard. Let me immediately set before the House my interests: I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. Our work is global: it addresses human rights abuses, and breaches of humanitarian law and the laws of war around the world. We are currently engaged in work on China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, Sudan and now Syria. We do legal training in many other countries too. At the moment, I am personally co-chairing a task force for President Zelensky of Ukraine on the war crime of the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia. Warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court and celebrated by many nations.

I was a member of the legal panel which reviewed the evidence that was to be used, by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, to apply for warrants before the court against Hamas and its leadership for the atrocity crimes committed on 7 October—horrifying crimes—and against the Israeli war leaders Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against the laws of war. That related to the failure to enable access to humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people.

The review involved looking at whether thresholds for evidence had been met, but decisions were always made by the prosecutor’s office. The warrants have now been issued by a court of law, not by the prosecutors. It relates to the impact of the absence of humanitarian aid on the well-being and health of the people of Palestine, of Gaza.

I sought this debate because of the grievous humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the near collapse of the healthcare system, with its enormous consequences for suffering people, and because of my concern that Parliament had been too silent on the suffering of the people in Gaza. We are on the brink of a negotiated ceasefire and, thank God, the release of the hostages. I hope and pray that it may be so. But it should not distract us from the dire immediate need for humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people. Those who are conducting this war on behalf of Israel, or who step in to the role of mediators or peacekeepers in the weeks and months to come, have to enable the immediate delivery of substantial aid.

A huge number of hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed and those which remain can barely function. Many medical staff have been killed. There is very little food and water in the region, and no fuel. A hospital cannot function without electricity for incubators, dialysis machines, operating theatres and sterilisation units. Disease is now rampant in the area because of the gross state of sanitation. The infrastructure of Gaza—from its sewers to its water supply pipes, to its schools, mosques and churches—has been destroyed: it is a moonscape. For over a year, no chlorine has been allowed to enter Gaza.

There is little medicine and virtually no medical supplies. Surgeons have had to operate without anaesthesia. The number of people, especially children, who have lost limbs runs into the thousands. To prevent people bleeding to death, ragged remains of limbs have to be sawn off and sutured. Modern doctors are not trained for the sheer horror of doing this kind of operation with patients who are conscious. Many of the international doctors have testified to the fact that they and other healthcare workers working for international organisations are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their experiences.

Israel’s debilitation of Gaza’s healthcare system is justified to the world on the basis that there are Hamas military targets within the hospitals, which may well be true. But what humane war leaders are prepared to kill people in their hospital beds or babies in incubators when there is a Hamas presence in a hospital? I will turn to some of the research that has been done on that in a minute.

Some 62% of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. That increases to 80% in northern Gaza. It would be hard to find a single family that has not lost multiple relatives. According to Israel, it has used 70,000 tonnes of bombs, which surpasses the tonnage dropped in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the six-year Second World War. The Geneva Convention sought to create new rules of engagement after the horrors of the Second World War, but they seem to count for nothing.

On 10 January, the World Health Organization warned that the Al-Awda hospital, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, is so overwhelmed with patients and critically low on essential supplies that care is basically impossible. Damaged roads and insufficient facilitation by the Israeli authorities have made safe access for the WHO impossible. Are we accusing it of making these things up? The UN estimates that, as of 31 December 2024—Christmas time—14,000 patients required medical evacuation abroad in order to meet their needs.

In the emergency debate of the UN Security Council on 3 January, on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the WHO said that Israeli forces had been conducting a systematic dismantling of the health system in northern Gaza. The WHO has verified that 654 attacks have been made on healthcare facilities. The UN human rights office published a report on 31 December claiming that

“Israel’s pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza … pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse”,

and that

“The conduct of hostilities in Gaza since 7 October has destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza, with predictably devastating consequences for the Palestinian people”.

The horrors go on. On 8 November 2024, the IPC Famine Review Committee stated:

“Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future”


in northern Gaza. The UN estimates that 60,000 children will require treatment for acute malnutrition in the course of this year.

Before the conflict, some 500 trucks entered Gaza every day. Now, every single person in Gaza requires humanitarian assistance, but in October, 57 trucks a day were allowed to cross into Gaza on average. Of course, it vacillates, but in this House we keep hearing that looting is the problem, with people taking the aid. No mention is made, I have noticed, of the extent to which attacks have been made on the humanitarian aid trucks by settlers from the West Bank. They have torn down humanitarian aid and overturned lorries, with IDF soldiers looking on, inactive.

A report by 29 NGOs, including Save the Children, Oxfam and others, detailed the looting of aid trucks as an ongoing issue, but called the theft of goods

“a consequence of Israel’s targeting of the remaining police forces in Gaza, scarcity of essential goods, lack of routes and closure of most crossing points, and the subsequent desperation of the population amid these dire conditions”.

Many of the those who are looting are young Palestinians who are trying to get food for their families, their parents and other people suffering in the absence of food.

On 10 January, a study was published in the medical journal the Lancet which estimates that the death toll, which people refer to as 47,000, is higher than that: between 55,298 and 78,525. They have split it in the middle, with a best estimate of 64,420.

Finally, I have just read a book by Omar El Akkad called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Each generation looks back in judgment at the moral blind spots of earlier generations, and it will happen on this subject too. One day, we will be ashamed of ourselves for our passivity and hypocrisy concerning what has been happening in Gaza. This silence has to be broken.