Open Letter in Support of the White Tent Protest, Healthcare is Not a Target, Geneva, January 2025

You can sign this open letter whether you are a healthworker, or a supporter of healthworkers (an ally). In this open letter in support of the White Tent Protest, we ask our governments, institutions, and international agencies to:

1. Work for a permanent, unconditional, and protected ceasefire

2. Demand the immediate release of detained healthcare workers and other civilians

3. Demand the restoration of Red Cross access

4. Work for UN protection for healthcare workers and patients, through the declaration of a genocide emergency

5. Work for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor

6. Work for accountability for violations of international law

International law prohibits attacks on medical facilities, healthworkers, and those needing care. The following provisions are illustrative:

Hospitals. Geneva Convention I, Article 19. 

Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.

Healthworkers. The First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention, Article 15.  

Civilian medical personnel shall be respected and protected. If needed, all available help shall be afforded to civilian medical personnel in an area where civilian medical services are disrupted by reason of combat activity.

Patients. The First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention, Article 10. 

All the wounded, sick and shipwrecked, to whichever Party they belong, shall be respected and protected. In all circumstances they shall be treated humanely and shall receive, to the fullest extent practicable and with the least possible delay, the medical care and attention required by their condition. There shall be no distinction among them founded on any grounds other than medical ones.

More than sixty genocide scholars and expert agencies have declared the devastation of Gaza a genocide, including Amnesty International, UN agencies, and Doctors Against Genocide.  Intent to commit genocide is clear in the statements of members of Israel's government, amplified and expanded by those of members of the armed forces, journalists and public figures.

In Gaza, since Oct 7, 2023, Israel has killed 46,000 people, including 11,000 children, 3,000 of whom are younger than five years old. The true death toll will exceed deaths from violence by three to 15-fold. Ten thousand people, including four thousand children, are amputees: the UN estimates that since 7 October 2023, 10 children have lost a limb each day. By February 2024, 17,000 children were orphaned or separated from parents or guardians. A UNICEF spokesperson reported, “Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on earth for its one million children”. By June 2024, 22 of Gaza’s 38 hospitals had been rendered non-functional. Forensic architectural evidence shows that in Gaza, far from being protected, hospitals have been targeted. 

We demand accountability for the genocide, for the targeting of healthcare, and for all other war crimes.

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