Elaine Loughlin: As the world looks away, our solidarity has never been more important

Women and children account for nearly 70% of deaths in Gaza, according to figures verified by the United Nations (UN).

Palestinian children have been denied an education for more than a year as their schools have been repeatedly bombed; they have been denied stability having been forced to move multiple times across the strip, many now living through the harsh winter in tents; denied food and water as aid supplies are repeatedly blocked at the border; denied their innocence, with thousands now ascribed the acronym WCNSF — “wounded child, no surviving family”.

For these children the long-term future is equally as bleak, there are no universities left in the strip, a non-existent economy, obliterated infrastructure, and little hope.

While Israel arrived at a ceasefire agreement with Lebanon this week, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) continues to attack schools, hospitals, and refugee camps, and the death toll has ticked up to 44,363, according the Hamas-run health ministry. After 13 months, the figures, just like the searing images of children clinging to each other in distress, begin to lose their impact.

But solidarity with Palestinian people has never been more important as the world slowly averts its gaze.

This week, Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor who has worked in Gaza many times over the past decade, and most recently as part of an emergency medical team, became emotional as she gave first-hand testimony to a UN committee.

At the start of this brutal campaign, her intervention would have gained widespread attention, but the problem with genocide is the relentless murder becomes almost expected. In fact, atrocity fatigue is what many brutal regimes rely upon.

Those who happened across her startling descriptions of lives upturned and destroyed may have seen clips edited down for social media. “We held the hands of children as they took their last breaths with no one but a stranger to comfort them. Those who recovered enough to leave hospital continued to face the obvious risk of death, be it through another bombing, starvation, dehydration, or disease,” she said.

As one of the few international observers allowed into Gaza I can tell you — spend just five minutes in a hospital there and it will become painfully clear that Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved, and stripped of everything needed to sustain life. 

What is left to say that might move people to action? How can we even begin to articulate what we have seen?” she asked.

This week, as Irish politicians and political hopefuls were engaged in a canvassing frenzy, their inboxes were filling up with a single pleading request.

“Dr Abu Sefiyeh who has worked tirelessly in Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza was injured by shrapnel when the Israeli army sent quadcopters into Kamal Adwan hospital and bombed it,” the email, marked as urgent began.

On social media, Dr Sefiyeh has appeared from his hospital bed, flanked by other injured medical staff, describing how he is bleeding internally, yet a specialist surgical team has not been given permission from Israel to travel to the hospital to carry out life-saving work.

“We call on the Irish government to insist that Israel gives safe passage to this medical team, to save Dr Abu Sefiyeh and his two daughters who are also injured, and the other patients there,” the email sent en-masse asked.

On October 17 last year, just 10 days into the bombardment, the world recoiled as a new line was crossed. An exposition ripped through a courtyard of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, making headlines for days. Israel pointed to a misfired rocket from Gaza, while Hamas pinned the blame on Netanyahu’s forces.

Since then hospitals, which have become shelters for tens thousands of war-torn families, have become battle grounds, targeted again and again by the IDF.

Healthcare workers have died while trying to rescue the wounded in what are infamously known as Israel’s double and triple strike attacks — a location is struck, then struck again a second and a third time once rescue workers have arrived to retrieve the casualties.

In total, more than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza.

Of the hundreds of nurses and doctors taken into Israeli captivity since the October 7 terrorist attack, at least four have now been killed while in detention.

How have global political leaders got to a stage where they allow this to become a normal part of war? We cannot and must not stand by as a new deadly precedent is set.

Addressing the UN’s Palestinian Rights Committee, Dr Haj-Hassan shared the harrowing words of her colleagues, still in Gaza with no hope of leaving a hell on earth.

Struggling to get the words out through her tears, she spoke on behalf Saed, a nurse who had been detained an tortured, and who wanted the world to know that “I am a human being. At the end I am not pen on a paper, I am not anonymous, I am a human being created by God.”

Numbers can become meaningless, but putting the level of death into context, Dr Haj-Hassan said that during the 24-hour period that she would be in New York for the UN event approximately 60 children would have be injured or killed in Gaza. She told the assembly:

One day someone will dig up the records of our testimonies, pleading for 14 months.

“They will dig up the records of Palestinians covering their own genocide when international journalists were unprecedently banned from entering.

“Palestinian children setting up press conferences to tell the world that their lives mattered.

“We will have to reckon with this history.”