by Paul Wolf

——

I don’t write as a politician, a diplomat or a statesman, but as a family doctor who has seen what happens when medicine is allowed to reach people – and what happens when it is blocked.

There are moments when history turns and looks at us. Gaza is such a moment.

A century of warning lights brought us here.

Europe’s Jews were forced into ghettos and trains and gas chambers while law, medicine and bureaucracy became weapons.

In Rwanda, neighbours killed neighbours in one hundred days.

In Srebrenica, men and boys were led into forests and never returned.

And afterward, when the silence broke, the world stood among the graves and said – never again.

Today the question before us is simple – did we mean it?

This is not a natural disaster. It is not fate.

It is the direct result of decisions made by the Israeli government and military.

It is their policy that has besieged Gaza by land, air and sea – cutting off food, fuel, water, electricity and medicine.

Entire families disappear in a night.

Hospitals run out of electricity, anaesthetic, clean water.

Surgeons operate by the light of mobile phones.

Ambulances are turned back at checkpoints.

Food exists. Fuel exists. Medicine exists.

When these are kept behind walls and borders, people do not die because help was impossible –

they die because help was forbidden.

This is not a failure of medicine.

It is a deliberate failure of will, enforced through policy.

“Never again” cannot mean never again for some.

It must mean never again for anyone – Jew or Palestinian, Tutsi or Rohingya, Yazidi or Bosniak.

The moment we decide one life is worth less than another, we begin the descent to every massacre we claim to mourn.

One day, when records are opened, the world will see that Gaza was not destroyed by earthquake or plague.

It was destroyed by decisions –

by orders to bomb civilian neighbourhoods, to cut electricity, to stop fuel, to delay evacuations and deny aid.

Hospital reports will list the cause of death as sepsis or hypoxia – and then, quietly beneath it:

electricity unavailable. Evacuation denied. Aid delayed.

This was not tragedy by nature.

This was policy.

United Nations experts, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Court of Justice have warned that these actions carry the hallmarks – and legal definition – of genocide.

Yes – Israeli families have suffered terror and loss.

On 7 October, children were taken hostage, parents murdered, families shattered.

Their grief is real. It demands justice.

But justice for them cannot be built on the destruction of another people.

Gaza is totally obliterated and looks almost like Nagasaki.

We do not balance graves.

We do not trade one child’s life for a thousand.

Protecting Israeli children cannot mean starving Palestinian children.

Security that starves is not security.

It is policy against life.

In Gaza, children arrive in hospitals with limbs gone, with burns no child should survive.

Doctors work on blood-soaked floors, without morphine, without gloves, while bombs shake the walls – and sometimes strike the wards themselves.

This is not war as we pretend to understand it.

It is the systematic breaking of a people – body, spirit and future – under orders.

The violence is loud in explosions.

It is silent in paper – a checkpoint unsigned, a fuel truck turned back, a form never approved.

And the question is not whether we knew.

We knew.

Medicine shows what is possible when life is given a chance.

When Anna Bågenholm fell beneath ice in Norway, her heart stopped for more than an hour. She lived because help was allowed to reach her.

Gaza shows what happens when that chance is denied.

When food, fuel and medicine exist – but are withheld – people do not die of fate. They die of policy.

They die because those in power chose it.

The breach has a name: complicity.

Complicity by those who besiege and bomb.

Complicity by those who cut water, fuel and medicine.

Complicity by those who supply the weapons and veto the ceasefires.

Complicity by every government that knew – and stayed silent.

History will not judge identities.

History will judge decisions.

History will judge the Netanyahu government and its military leadership. They carry direct responsibility. And if international justice is allowed to function, it will hold them to account.

So what must be done as first priority?

Open the crossings.

Flood the aid.

Halt the weapons that make starvation a strategy.

Free the hostages, from all sides.

Release the unlawfully detained.

Protect hospitals, medics and patients – because that is the first mark of civilisation.

Restore water, electricity and the basic dignity of survival.

Speak the truth: withholding the means of life is not defence.

It is control.

Gaza will not be remembered as a verdict against a faith or a people.

Jewish life and Palestinian life hold equal worth.

What history will ask is whether we allowed survival itself to become secondary to vengeance or power.

History will not ask whether we knew.

We did.

The International Community did

It will not ask whether food, fuel and medicine existed.

They did.

It will ask only this:

When children were pulled from rubble…

When doctors were killed beside their patients…

When journalists died telling the truth…

When civilians were left without water, power or escape…

Did any nation speak – or did they stand silent?

No nation has the right to starve a population and call it security.

No army has the right to bomb homes, hospitals, schools or press vests – and call it self-defence.

These are not acts of nature.

They are choices.

They carry names, signatures and consequence.

If human dignity means anything, it is this:

The life of a civilian – child, mother, father, healer, journalist – is not collateral.

Not expendable.

Not a tool of war.

Not in Gaza.

Not in Israel.

Not anywhere on Earth.

History is watching.

And it will remember who stood silent – and who refused.

It will remember Netanyahu. It will remember the governments that supplied the weapons. It will remember that these were used against a population that could not protect itself.

by Paul Alexander Wolf 🇳🇱 🇿🇦 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇦🇺 🇵🇸