The seat of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Netherlands.

by Paul Alexander Wolf 🇦🇺

Professional Disclaimer:

I am a registered medical practitioner in Australia. The views expressed here are entirely my own and are offered in a personal, humanitarian capacity. They do not represent the views of AHPRA, any medical organisation, employer or government body. This statement is not directed at any religion, ethnicity or people. It is a call for the protection of human life, medical neutrality and accountability under international law.

————->>

I do not speak or write as a politician or a diplomat. I write, again (!), as a family doctor who has seen what happens when medicine is allowed to reach people – and what happens when it is blocked. Blocked by evil forces of power.

There are moments in history when the world turns around and looks at us. Gaza is such a moment. Not to speak about Sudan.

In the last century, Europe’s Jews were forced into ghettos and trains and gas chambers while law, medicine and bureaucracy were turned into weapons.

In Rwanda, neighbours killed countless neighbours in only one hundred days.

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

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?

Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is not a tragedy of fate. It is the result of decisions – made by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and by the military leadership of the Israeli Defence Forces – decisions that have cut off food, water, fuel, electricity, medical supplies; decisions that have left hospitals without anaesthetic, without power, without oxygen; decisions that have turned Gaza into rubble and silence.

Entire families disappear in a night.

The suffering is endless!

Hospital generators fail. The lights go out.

Operating theatres fall quiet because there is no electricity, no sterilisation, no morphine.

Ambulances are turned back at checkpoints.

Children arrived with limbs gone and burns no child could survive in the circumstances as they have been.

And in intensive care, when the oxygen runs out, children die. Children still die due to the slow and cruel starvation, the implications of malnutrition beyond words.

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, yes, forbidden!

This is not medicine failing.

This is will – organised into policy.

It’s organised crime through evil.

“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 that bombed civilian neighbourhoods, cut electricity, stopped fuel, delayed evacuations and denied aid.

Hospital reports will list sepsis or hypoxia – and then, quietly beneath it: electricity unavailable. Evacuation denied. Aid delayed.

This was not tragedy by nature.

This was policy.

Policy by the wider decision making of the Netanyahu Government. A Government compromising the rich Hebrew tradition.

United Nations experts, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have warned in the clearest terms that these actions bear the hallmarks – and legal definition – of genocide. Their language is unambiguous about the scale of civilian targeting, the destruction of infrastructure necessary for life, and the intent inferred from sustained patterns of conduct. The moral meaning is plain.

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, the way it has been done in, frankly, the most horrible dimensions.

It reflects pure evil at the backbones of Netanyahu and those who follow him.

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.

Gaza is obliterated. Look at the images. Cities flattened. Neighbourhoods erased. Schools, universities, hospitals – gone. This is not the fog of war. This is the systematic breaking of a people – body, spirit and future – under orders.

The violence is loud in explosions.

It is silent on paper – a form not signed, a crossing kept shut, a fuel truck turned back.

The question is not whether we knew. We knew.

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

In Norway, Anna Bågenholm’s 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 ceasefires.

Complicity by every government that knew – and stayed silent.

History will not judge identities.

History will judge decisions, and the people being responsible. Like happened after the Second World War.

History will judge the Netanyahu government and its military leadership. They carry direct responsibility for the policies that produced this suffering. And when international justice is allowed to function, it will hold them to account.

Another government has now said what many have been afraid to say. Turkey’s Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for 37 senior Israeli officials – including Benjamin Netanyahu – alleging genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. This is more than legal process. It is a moral marker. It says plainly that the obliteration of Gaza is not an accident – it is the outcome of choices.

So what must be done – first, and now:

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. Tell the truth: withholding the means of life is not defence. It is control.

Besides this, isolate Israel and don’t supply them with weapons until they give over the people who should stand trial for crimes against humanity.

This is not a verdict against a faith or a people.

Jewish life and Palestinian life hold equal worth. They both have a beautiful cultural history, where one culture is more privileged than the other.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu taught us – if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. To remain silent while children are starved and bombed is to stand with the machinery that harms them.

What history will ask is whether we allowed survival itself to become compromised until death followed for men, women and foremost perhaps the children, who are still waiting for medical evacuation but dying meanwhile.

It 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.

I stand with life. I stand with those who keep the oath of medicine under impossible skies. I stand with every child’s right to breathe.

And I refuse to be silent!

I cherish the Palestinian spirit which can’t be destroyed, which deserves a free State and dignity, – autonomy and the right to be a peaceful nation. A State which doesn’t believe in cruelty, torture, assassinations, and the targeted killings of people and relentless bombardments. A State and a people which stayed together, despite all the losses, the grief and the destruction.

The world needs to intervene

Israel could have been a beacon of light, but proved to be the provider of darkness in a pointless military endeavour beyond reasonable understanding – and those responsible must face justice – not vengeance, but accountability, as both the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the courts of The Hague demand.

Finally:

Peace is indivisible.

Peace cannot be broken into pieces – safe for one nation and denied to another.

Either it is shared by all, or it is only temporary.

As long as any part of the world is at war, none of us can truly feel secure.

Peace is not a privilege; it is a responsibility we hold together.

—————>>

>>Postscript: Evidence, Documentation & Testimony>>:

Because truth must be spoken – and also proven.

What follows is not rhetoric, but documentation.

These sources and testimonies stand alongside the address, not to soften it, but to anchor it in fact.

1. Genocide and Intent Under International Law

Amnesty International (December 2024) concluded there is “sufficient basis to believe that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza”. The report details three prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention: killing members of a protected group causing serious bodily or mental harm deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction A UN Commission of Inquiry (2025) also reported that acts committed by Israeli forces meet the legal definition of genocide. The State of Israel rejects all accusations of genocide.

2. Destruction of Healthcare and Killing of Medical Workers

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (August 2025) described the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health system as “medicide” – the targeted killing or disabling of healthcare as an institution. The World Health Organization recorded over 700 attacks on hospitals, ambulances and clinics since October 2023. Fewer than 20 of 36 hospitals remain even partially functional. Medical Aid for Palestinians and The Lancet confirm over 1,400 doctors, nurses and paramedics killed. Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and Healthcare Workers Watch report that Palestinian medical staff have been detained, tortured, denied legal access, and some died in custody. Hospitals report patients dying after oxygen supplies ran out, newborns removed from incubators when power failed, and surgeries performed without anaesthetic.

3. Siege, Starvation and Humanitarian Blockade

Amnesty International (May 2025) stated that Israel’s blockade amounts to “the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare”. UNICEF and WHO confirm child deaths from dehydration and malnutrition, and tens of thousands of children entering catastrophic hunger. Food, fuel and medicine exist, but are kept behind borders or controlled crossings. UN officials have stated repeatedly – this is not a natural famine, it is man-made.

4. Civilians, Journalists and Children Targeted

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports more than 240 journalists and media workers killed – the deadliest conflict for the press since records began. Save the Children and UNICEF report thousands of children killed or permanently disabled, many with traumatic amputations or shrapnel injuries. The UN Human Rights Office documented the use of 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas, and strikes on UN schools, refugee camps and hospitals. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International confirmed the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas. Israel denies deliberately targeting civilians.

5. Legal Actions and International Accountability

The International Criminal Court (November 2024) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity – including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Turkey’s Istanbul Chief Prosecutor (November 2025) issued arrest warrants for 37 Israeli officials for genocide and crimes against humanity under Turkish universal jurisdiction law. Several countries have partially suspended weapons exports to Israel, citing risk of complicity in international crimes.

6. Personal Testimony – What I Have Seen First-Hand

This part is written intentionally in the first person.

I have personally seen unfiltered photos and videos sent by medical workers and civilians in Gaza. These were not published news clips. They were raw footage shared directly from hospital corridors, emergency tents and bombed homes.

What I saw included:

Children with parts of their skull missing – brain tissue exposed – worse in appearance to the fatal head wound of President John F. Kennedy, but in infants. Wounds from small-calibre bullets that enter the body and fragment or explode internally – tearing through organs. Limbs severed, torsos opened, shrapnel lodged in faces and spines of children who were still alive. Operating rooms lit only by phone torches – no electricity, no anaesthetic – surgeons performing amputations while children were awake and crying. Rows of premature babies lying lifeless after incubators shut down when power was cut. Ambulances that never reached hospitals – medics shot, blocked or detained while still in uniform. Doctors released from detention describing being beaten, starved and humiliated while still wearing medical scrubs.

These are not metaphors. I saw them. I carry these images in my mind – and I cannot forget them.

Closing Note

This postscript does not exist to shock. It exists so that no one can say “we did not know.”

The address speaks to the conscience. This section speaks to the record.

Paul Alexander Wolf 🇦🇺