In Gaza, Israel aims to destroy civil order, but it is failing

Ghada Ageel

As the head of Gaza’s ambulance services, Hani al-Jaafarawi had one of the toughest jobs amid Israel’s genocidal war on the strip. Even before October 7, his staff were stretched thin, overworked and under constant threat. After the start of the war, al-Jaafarawi was hands-on in the medical response.

Hospitals, clinics and all health facilities were under extreme threat, and every day al-Jaafarawi’s life hung in the balance. But on June 23, the balance tipped away from him when Israeli forces attacked Daraj Health Clinic in Gaza City, killing him and four other civilians. His only crime was his dedication to the civil defence of Gaza’s beleaguered population.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, he was the 500th health worker killed in Gaza.

The murder of al-Jaafarawi was part of Israel’s systematic campaign to destroy civil services provision in Gaza. It has purposefully targeted and killed medical personnel, Palestinian Civil Defence workers, ambulance drivers, rescue teams, police forces, civil engineers, utility workers, aid convoy drivers and civil society leaders with the aim to create chaos and lawlessness in Gaza and to demoralise the population.

The official justification used by the Israeli Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) for the targeted killings of these professionals is that they are affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) by virtue of working for government institutions in Gaza.

This rationale is spurious. Working under a government does not infer support for its political agenda or membership in the political party that leads it. We cannot assume that every Israeli employed by the Israeli state supports the war crimes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so why should we assume anything about Palestinian public employees and their political sympathies?

International law makes a clear distinction between combatants and civilians, and the political views of the latter make no difference. That, of course, is yet another aspect of the international legal regime that Israel wilfully ignores.

Two days before al-Jaafarawi’s murder, an Israeli air strike killed four municipal employees and one passer-by in the centre of Gaza City. The workers were preparing to repair water pipes to help restore water supplies. The water infrastructure has been a frequent target of the IOF, as the deprivation of this basic service has led to mass suffering and the spread of disease among Palestinians, which, of course, helps Israel’s genocidal designs.

Efforts by engineers and communications workers to break the Israeli-imposed internet blackout on Gaza have also repeatedly resulted in deaths. In January, an Israeli tank attacked a team sent to repair a switchboard generator in Khan Younis, killing two of them. This was despite the fact that they had coordinated their movements and the task they were sent to carry out with the IOF.

The Israeli military has also repeatedly targeted health facilities and workers, killing or kidnapping some of Gaza’s best medical specialists and top hospital administrators. According to the United Nations, by August, 885 medical workers had been killed in Gaza.

Some were targeted in their homes and some in the hospitals where they had stayed behind to take care of patients as Israeli forces carried out raids. Others were tortured to death like Dr Adnan al-Bursh, a senior orthopaedic surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, and Dr Iyad al-Rantisi, head of obstetrics and gynaecology at Kamal Adwan Hospital.

The decimation of Gaza’s health sector and the mass killing of doctors and other medical professionals mean that Palestinians do not have access to proper healthcare whether they are chronically ill, newly infected with a disease or injured by Israel’s incessant bombardments. This again helps Israel’s genocide.

As many videos of the aftermath of air strikes show, the wounded are usually brought to severely underresourced and dysfunctional medical facilities where they are placed on the ground in a pool of blood as the few medical workers available scramble to do emergency care. Many who would normally be saved die.

Israel’s wholesale destruction of every public service that sustains life in Gaza has brought the Palestinian population to the brink. A neighbour from Khan Younis refugee camp recently wrote to me: “[The Israelis] have not left a sewage pipe, a water pipe, a water desalination unit, bakeries, communication towers, or homes. They ran over the greenhouses and trees, they bombed the mosques and schools. They bombed anything and everything. Total destruction. We are all targets and no one is safe.  No doctor, no university professor, no child, no woman, no lawyer, no journalist and no place or facility – UN or otherwise – is safe. They tell us that we have to leave Gaza if we want to stay alive.”

Israel’s aim in wiping out any semblance of civil order and service provision is, of course, to sow despair among Palestinians and subdue any impulse they may have to resist occupation, subjugation and dispossession. But this strategy is doomed to fail for two reasons: because it is violating international law and because it is ineffective.

Israel has long ignored and violated the international legal regime. But what it is doing in Gaza right now even its staunchest supporters are having trouble defending. In January, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling in which it called Israel’s actions in Gaza “plausibly” genocidal. In May, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan called on the court to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes committed in Gaza.

In June, an independent UN investigation concluded that Israel had committed crimes against humanity during the war. The UN Commission of Inquiry, which conducted the investigation, stated in its report: “The immense numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza and widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure were the inevitable result of a strategy undertaken with intent to cause maximum damage, disregarding the principles of distinction, proportionality, and adequate precautions.”

While Israel is committing war crimes by wiping out Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and services and killing the people who maintain them, these actions will not fulfil the long-term goal: to force Palestinians to capitulate and renounce their claim to their homeland.

For 11 months now, the strongest army in the region and one of the most advanced in the world has been unable to attain a military victory against an armed resistance group – unless one considers the mass killing of civilians, mostly women and children, and the total destruction of their livelihood as a measure of success.

In a June article in Foreign Affairs magazine, political scientist Robert A Pape argued that Israel in many ways has “made its enemy stronger” than it was before the October 7 attacks because it has made it more popular and in this way more effective in recruiting.

In a subsequent interview, Pape argued that Israel’s strategy of overwhelming airpower is failing just as such approaches failed in Vietnam and Iraq. Overwhelming firepower tends to bring civilian populations together in mutual solidarity against the enemy. This is what is happening in Gaza right now.

Israel has been indiscriminately bombing to make Gaza ultimately unliveable and to force the Palestinians into a mass exodus at the threat of mass death. That has taken an unbelievable toll on the people of Gaza.

But Israel’s attempts to destroy the social fabric of Palestinian society, erase its institutions and crush its spirit are ultimately failing. That is because the people of Gaza, supported by their global allies, are responding to this erasure through collective acts of defiance, striving with every effort to maintain utilities, health and education services, and their community life.

The recent reopening of a small emergency unit at al-Shifa Hospital is emblematic of this enduring resilience. Such efforts not only demonstrate the courage of Palestinian public employees but also the global network of support and the immense mobilisation of the Palestinian diaspora and allies worldwide.

This defiance to policies and acts of erasure is deeply rooted in the history of Palestinian resistance, expressed both in words and actions. When I last spoke with my niece, Amal, shortly after she had turned 18, I asked her what she wished for on her birthday. She responded by reciting an excerpt from the great Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s A Call of the Land that reflects the Palestinian spirit:

I ask nothing more than
to die in my country,
to dissolve and merge with the grass,
to give life to a flower
that a child of my country will pick.
All I ask is to remain in the bosom of my country,
as soil,
grass,
a flower.