Hypocrisy about Gaza in the NEJM. Hipocresía acerca de Gaza en el NEJM. ENGL ESP

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Perspective 
Health Care Bridges — Pathways toward Trust in Gaza and Beyond
The NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL of MEDICINE
March 27, 2025 
October 7, 2023, two Palestinian physicians awoke to the sounds of bombs exploding and rockets falling. Dr. Abu Fraiha rushed to Soroka Medical Center, the largest trauma center in southern Israel. She spent the day in the hospital’s emergency department treating hundreds of patients who were running away from terror attacks initiated by Hamas, most of them with gun- shot wounds and blast injuries. Many were dead on arrival, their bodies so desecrated that it took days to identify them.

Less than 25 miles away, Dr. Ahmed’s hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, was bombed, so he went to help out in the Indonesian Hospi- tal, near the opposite end of the Gaza Strip. In the next few days there, he encountered utter chaos: hundreds of patients flooded in, having escaped from bombings by the Israel Defense Forces, with severe burns, amputated limbs, and blast injuries. The hospital struggled to cope, with injured patients being treated on the floor owing to a lack of beds, un- dergoing painful procedures with no anesthetics, and taken care of only by junior physicians and med- ical students, without any mem- bers of the skilled trauma team available to manage the over- whelming number of critical cas- es.

A week later, Dr. Ahmed was forced to leave his home and suddenly found himself the sole doctor caring for 20,000 people in a refugee camp in southern Gaza, treating everything from acute respiratory infections to chronic illnesses, and managing infectious outbreaks in dire con- ditions.

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COMMENT 

March 26, 2025
The World’s Top Medical Journal Is Giving Cover to Genocide

The New England Journal of Medicine has finally broken its silence on Gaza, only to obscure the truth of an American-backed Israeli genocide unfolding in real time.

Last Friday (21st March 2025), Israeli forces, just days after killing over 200 children in a single 24-hour period, blew up the only cancer hospital in Gaza, along with an adjacent medical school. By then, it was clear that Israel had fully resumed its war on Gaza’s hospitals, health workers, and essential health infrastructure.

The next morning, The New England Journal of Medicine published its first-ever article acknowledging the devastation in Gaza. Over the preceding 17 months of what UN investigations and others have declared is an unambiguously genocidal Israeli assault on Palestinian civilians, the NEJM, which is widely regarded as the world’s most influential medical journal, had received countless submissions on the subject and rejected every single one of them. Amid these decisions, the Journal was subjected to repeated criticism for silence and hypocrisy in the face of one of the most pressing, preventable public health catastrophes in recent history.

At long last, the Journal’s silence has been broken. Its long-awaited intervention comes in the form of an article titled “Health Care Bridges—Pathways toward Trust in Gaza and Beyond.” A piece on such a charged subject would have been carefully edited by the Journal’s staff, including, most likely, its editor in chief. For a powerful American institution that has waited until now to address US-backed violence in Gaza, the article is as evasive and anti-political as we might have expected.

The piece—written by Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Israelis Noam Alon and Avner Halperin, and Abdalrahman Ahmed, a Palestinian from Gaza—rejects any rigorous accounting of Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s medical infrastructure in favor of gauzy platitudes about how healthcare can be an avenue for “building trust” between two warring populations. “The four of us, Palestinians and Israelis, firmly believe in the need to foster hope and build trust,” the authors write. “While watching hospitals turn into battlefields, we’ve also witnessed firsthand the power of healthcare to overcome animosity and bridge the divides between populations in conflict.” It takes great pains to describe the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the deaths of its doctors and patients as an unfortunate byproduct of war, as though bombs simply fell from the sky independent of anyone motivated by genocidal intent and without any connection to a long-standing colonial project.

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