We health care and public health workers and future health workers of Hawaii call for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s assault on Palestine. As health workers, we hold all lives to be precious, and we cannot be silent. We therefore condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7 killings of Israeli civilians. Israel’s assault on Gaza has gone beyond retaliation for Oct. 7, however, and fulfills the United Nation’s definition of genocide, which “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Israel’s leaders openly stated that the people of Gaza would be denied food, water, electricity and fuel. Prior to Oct. 7, Gaza, as an occupied territory, was dependent on 500 trucks per day of supplies, including medicines. It goes without saying that the denial of food and water leads to death. With its air and ground assault, Israel has destroyed half the structures in Northern Gaza. By targeting mosques, schools, universities, bakeries, refugee camps, residences and infrastructure, Israel is destroying Gaza’s civil society and ecology. As health workers, we find the targeting of hospitals the most depraved.

Hospitals are humanity’s refuge for the ill and injured. Hospitals are where babies are born and where the sick seek comfort. Israel’s assault on hospitals, on patients, on health care workers are crimes against humanity. Without medicines, Gaza’s doctors have been operating on patients without anesthesia. Without electricity, they have been operating with cellphone lights. With the Israeli military invasion of the Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, patients on life support and babies in incubators died.

In the seven weeks since Oct. 7, of 2.3 million Gazans, more than 14,000 have been killed, 40% of them children. That is, over half the killed have been women and children. That is, more than 1 in 200 people in Gaza have been killed. How would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood, and half the houses were razed? Numerous Palestinian health workers have been killed, many as they tended to patients, others while they were at home with their families.

We health workers of Hawaii are sick to our stomachs of the killing. We decry genocide. We want peace, coexistence and equal rights as humans. We call for a permanent ceasefire now.

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ONLINE:

More than 100 Hawaii health-care workers have signed a petition calling for an immediate ceasefire; see https://forms.gle/SeyycJzGFL8pV4XA6.

Seiji Yamada, Arcy Imasa and Kalamaokaaina Niheu are health workers in Hawaii; this piece was co-signed by Rick Rothschiller.