Protecting health care in Gaza and defending human rights

That hospitals, and health workers, should be protected during war is a fundamental part of international law. And, these days, a part that’s being regularly violated. In the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, the WHO has documented multiple attacks on hospitals and clinics.

Now, in Gaza, we see this again. Over the Easter weekend Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City appears to have been reduced to rubble. Israel claims Hamas fighters are operating from the hospital grounds, but many international law experts suggest the ferocity of the attacks, on other hospitals as well as Al Shifa, and on Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances, show a lack of precaution.

On Inside Geneva this week, we talk in-depth to an aid worker involved in trying to support Gaza’s hospitals with medical supplies. His job may not be what you expect though; Chris Black works for the World Health Organisation’s audio visual unit – he’s a cameraman with decades of experience in conflict and crisis zones. He volunteered for a five-week mission to Gaza in an attempt “to document” he told me, the WHO’s work in Gaza, and to show how important it is that medical centres and staff can continue to function.

His first impressions on arriving, he tells Inside Geneva, were of the “utter destruction” in large parts of Gaza, and of huge concentrations of people now living in Rafah. Every square inch of ground seemed to be occupied, with some families even “living on roundabouts.”

‘Am I safe here’?

When permission was finally granted for the small WHO team to enter Al Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Black found himself not just filming their work, but helping to carry the stretchers of critically ill patients who, it had been agreed, could be evacuated somewhere safer.

By this time, the hospital had had no water or electricity for days, and very little food. Outside, and indeed even at times inside, the hospital had become a battleground. Medical staff had had to resort to burying the dead in the hospital grounds, cats were eating medical waste that had been impossible to dispose of appropriately. All this can be seen in Black’s footage.

But what he remembers most were the many patients and their families, emerging out of the dark. One woman, holding her baby, asked him ‘‘Are we safe here?’ And I wanted to say to her ‘You’re in the grounds of a hospital’ Black told me. ‘‘This is a protected space, you should be safe here’.  But I couldn’t say to her ‘you’re safe here.’’

Do listen to Black’s in-depth interview on Inside Geneva. It’s a compelling account of humanitarian work in the most challenging of conditions, and should be a tribute, Black hopes, not just to aid workers like him who volunteer for such missions, but, more importantly, to the aid workers and healthcare staff who are in Gaza permanently. Many of them, like the engineer who returned day after day to try to fix Al Nasser’s generator, have lost close family members, and yet carry on with their work.

“People have told me ‘oh you must be very brave for going to Gaza, Black said. “I don’t think so, I think what’s brave is the people who have been doing this work since early October, and who go back every day, to do it again and again and again.”

No democracy without human rights

The second part of Inside Geneva this week hears from human rights defenders who are attending the current session of the UN Human Rights Council. Of course, Geneva journalists are used to this – every session of the Council sees multiple NGO’s and human rights activists descend on the city, each with a cause to call attention to.

But paying attention just during those Council sessions would be a mistake, and would devalue the hard work, the challenges, and the risks that human rights defenders face at home. Many work in highly repressive, authoritarian countries, others work in conflict zones.

During this Council session, I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on the importance – necessity – of human rights defenders to democracy. Organised by the permanent mission of Finland, the discussion provided some telling insights into the work of human rights defenders, and some worrying accounts of how that work can be undervalued.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who stood against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko after her husband was arrested, told us that human rights defenders in Belarus felt the world had forgotten them, but insisted “we are not giving up.”

Sara Abdelgalil, a human rights defender and paediatrician, has spent has spent much of her life campaigning for democracy in her native Sudan, only to see it ripped away in 2021 by a military coup, and then, last year, Sudan’s descent into civil war. She described the “disappointment of Sudanese human rights defenders and pro-democracy activists…some of them say that it seems like democracy is not for us.”

But she too is not deterred, her fight for human rights and democracy continues, despite the challenges. Abdelgalil and Tikhanovskaya, and many thousands like her all over the world deserve more support from those of us lucky enough to live in functioning democracies. Their work, said Phil Lynch of the International Service for Human Rights, is fundamental to the freedoms we enjoy.

‘‘Without human rights defenders there are no human rights. Without human rights there is no democracy, or rule of law.”

 “We are not asking you to fight instead of us” added Tikhanovskaya. “We are asking you to help us fight the dictators.”

“I really believe that the democratic, powerful world will show its teeth and will show to dictators that they will not prevail.”

They won’t, if we were all as committed as Tikhanovskaya and Abdelgalil. Listen to Inside Geneva, and be inspired!

Edited by Virginie Mangin/livm