the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Apr 8, 2024
After a two-week siege by Israeli forces, al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital and one of its biggest employers, is in ruins—a wasteland, as one of the hospital’s surgeons put it.
After raiding the hospital in November, Israeli forces returned to al-Shifa a second time on March 18. Fighting with Hamas fighters ensued, trapping patients and staff in the hospital, as well as residents in neighborhoods around it.
When Israeli forces and their tanks left the hospital complex on April 1, the emergency and surgery departments had been mostly destroyed—and so were many homes around the hospital. Bodies lay decomposing in the hospital’s courtyard and its hallways.
Israeli commanders said that none of the casualties were civilians—a claim strongly disputed by Palestinians and also by the World Health Organization, which said that, during Israel’s siege of the hospital, 21 patients had died and that the rest of the patients were left without enough food, water, health care and basic sanitation.
In any event, what was Gaza’s largest hospital, with 17,000 surgeries and 250,000 emergency room patients a year, has now been definitely rendered out of commission. Out of 36 hospitals that existed in the Gaza Strip six months ago, only about 12 are functional, and only partially. They severely lack supplies, including basic needs such as bed space and anesthesia.
Al-Shifa, once a rare symbol of remedy for Gaza’s impoverished population, has now been reduced to another symbol of Israel’s all-out, barbaric war on the people in the Gaza Strip.