The Deliberate Destruction of Healthcare in Gaza Calls Us All to Action

The Deliberate Destruction of Healthcare in Gaza Calls Us All to Action

By Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

Published on TimesLive on August 4, 2025

https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times-daily/opinion-and-analysis/2025-08-04-thabo-makgoba-gaza-tragedy-echoes-the-apartheid-past-a-call-for-urgent-global-action/

Under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, intentionally attacking hospitals and medical personnel is a war crime. The Geneva Conventions oblige all parties in a war to protect medical facilities, patients, and staff at all times. Yet in Gaza, such attacks have not only become widespread — they are systematic.

Almost two and a half thousand years ago, the prophet Isaiah urged us to seek justice and defend the oppressed. The moral urgency of the prophet’s call speaks to every generation, and in every part of the world where the sanctity of humanity is threatened. In the 1980s, that call rang out with potent moral force in apartheid South Africa. Today, it resounds in Gaza with intense moral urgency.

In April 2024, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng — the South African medical doctor serving as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health — warned the Human Rights Council that the health system in Gaza had been “completely obliterated” and that the right to health had been “decimated at every level.” By October 2024, she had introduced a new term for what she was witnessing — “medicide”: the use of military force and state policy to systematically destroy access to medical care. In June 2025, she declared that the right to health in Gaza had become “virtually non-existent.”

Two Israeli organisations — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel — have now produced reports that independently affirm Mofokeng’s findings. Their language is restrained, but the substance is devastating. Both organisations conclude that the Israeli government is deliberately attacking medical personnel and institutions in gross violation of international law.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel documents the arrest, torture and killing of medical personnel, the blocking of medical evacuations, and the destruction of hospitals and clinics. They have verified hundreds of cases of healthcare workers detained by Israeli forces — including doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, students, and administrators. Many have reported torture. Some have died in custody. Others remain missing after hospital invasions. The average length of imprisonment for those detained is eight months. Among those named in the report is Dr Adnan Ahmed Attia Al-Bursh, whose body remains in Israeli custody following his death in detention. Several others — including hospital directors — were abducted from medical facilities, and remain unaccounted for.

In parallel, B’Tselem documents the broader infrastructure of destruction: the targeted obliteration of Gaza’s capacity to function as a society. It describes how the killing of civilians, forced expulsions, and destruction of homes are coordinated with attacks on basic systems — including health, water, and shelter — to produce unlivable conditions. The report argues that what we are witnessing is not a deviation from previous patterns of control, but a transition to what it bluntly calls “annihilation.”

Dr Mofokeng has described Gaza as a place where “the right to life no longer exists.” Children are dying of sepsis for lack of antibiotics, women are giving birth without anaesthesia, and amputees are left untreated for lack of surgical supplies. Gaza’s healthcare system has not collapsed; it has been dismantled.

As a South African, I recall — and give profound thanks for — the role that global solidarity played in ending apartheid. The struggle against apartheid was not won by moral outrage alone. It was won by mass struggle at home, and sustained by concrete action abroad: mass protest, boycotts, divestment and strikes which steadily eroded impunity for the apartheid regime and the majority of white South African society that sustained it. The situation of the Palestinian people today requires the same clarity and courage. It requires the same kind of direct and effective action in defence of our shared humanity.

South Africa has called for accountability at the International Court of Justice and has joined other states, mostly from the Global South, in calling for accountability through the Hague Group. Governments in countries like Namibia and Colombia, among others, have taken clear actions in support of the people of Gaza.

Ordinary people across the world are also taking action, often in courageous and principled ways. Communities of faith have been coming together in churches, mosques, synagogues and elsewhere to affirm their solidarity with the people of Gaza. And from students in the United States to dockworkers in Greece and shack dwellers in South Africa secular organisations and individuals have acted in defence of the inviolable and universal value of human life.

The path forward must begin with an immediate ceasefire. The blockade must be lifted. Humanitarian access, including medical support, must be granted without obstruction. There must be a decisive end to the deliberately engineered famine. Food must be made available immediately, safely, and at scale.

After these immediate actions there will need to be an international commitment to building a just peace. There will need to be massive long-term investment in healing and repair, a process that will need to continue for generations. For people of faith there will also need to be deep repentance for our failure to act swiftly and effectively enough.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” That statement is as true today in Gaza as it is in the Congo or Sudan. We are all called to action. To direct and effective action. On this, there can be no equivocation.

Dr Makgoba is the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and Primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa