Israel is forcing two hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate under threat of attack as its ethnic cleansing campaign continues.

Israeli forces have surrounded the Indonesian Hospital, where many staff and patients sought shelter after nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was destroyed in an Israeli raid last week, reports Al Jazeera.

Late on Friday, a forced order to evacuate was also issued for the al-Awda Hospital, where 100 people are believed to be sheltering.

The evacuation order came today as New Zealand Palestine solidarity protesters followed a silent vigil outside Auckland Hospital yesterday with a rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today, where doctors and other professional health staff called for support for Gaza’s besieged health facilities and protection for medical workers.

When one New Zealand medical professional recalled the first time that the Israel military bombed a hospital in in Gaza November 2023, the world was “ready to accept the the lies that Israel told then”.

“Of course, they wouldn’t bomb a hospital, who would bomb a hospital? That’s a horrible war crime, if must have been Hamas that bombed themselves.

“And the world let Israel get away with it. That’s the time that we knew if the world let Israel get away with it once, they would repeat it again and again and we would allow a dangerous precedent to be set where health care workers and health care centres would become targets over and over again.

“In the past year it is exactly what we have seen,” he said to cries of shame.

“We have seen not only the targeting of health care infrastructure, but the targeting of healthcare workers.

“The murdering of healthcare workers, of aid workers all across Gaza at the hands of Israel — openly without any word of opposition from our government, without a word of opposition from any global government about these war crimes and genocidal actions until today.”

In an impassioned speech about the devastating price that Gazans were paying for the Israeli war, New Zealand Palestinian doctor and Gaza survivor Dr Abdallah Gouda vowed that his people would keep their dream for an independent state of Palestine and “we will never leave Gaza”.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation into the Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals and medical workers.

Volker Türk told the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East that Israeli claims of Hamas launching attacks from hospitals in Gaza were often “vague” and sometimes “contradicted by publicly available information”.

Palestine urges UN to end Gaza genocide, ‘Israeli impunity’
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, said: “It is our collective responsibility to bring this hell to an end. It is our collective responsibility to bring this genocide to an end.”

Norway is the latest country to condemn the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers.

On X, the country’s Foreign Ministry said that “urgent action” was needed to restore north Gaza’s hospitals, which were continuously subjected to Israeli attack.

Without naming Israel, the ministry said that “health workers, patients and hospitals are not lawful targets”.

Urgent action is needed to restore North Gaza’s hospitals and uphold international humanitarian law.

Protecting healthcare saves lives.
We share WHOs concern at #UNSC

Health workers, patients, and hospitals are not lawful targets. https://t.co/VWswcGhCex

— Norway MFA (@NorwayMFA) January 3, 2025

Israel ‘deprives 40,000’ of healthcare in northern Gaza
The Israeli military is systematically destroying hospitals in northern Gaza, the Gaza Government Media Office said.

In a statement, it said: “The Israeli occupation continues its heinous crimes and arbitrary aggression against hospitals and medical teams in northern Gaza, reflecting a dangerous and deliberate escalation.”

These acts, it added, were being carried out amid “unjustified silence of the international community and the UN Security Council”, violating international humanitarian law and human rights conventions.

The statement highlighted the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, where its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, was arrested and reportedly subjected to physical and psychological abuse.

The GMO described these acts as “full-fledged war crimes”.

According to a recent report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military had conducted more than 136 air raids on at least 27 hospitals and 12 medical facilities across Gaza in the past eight months.

The GMO report demanded an independent international investigation into these violations and accountability for Israel in international courts.

Amnesty International criticises detention of Kamal Adwan doctor
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog Amnesty International, said Israel’s detention of Dr Hussam Abu Safia underscored a pattern of “genocidal intent and genocidal acts” by Israel in Gaza.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Striking New Zealand health workers have picketed around the country, saying they are fed up with being underpaid and undervalued.

About 10,000 allied health staff who work at district health boards have walked off the job for 24 hours, with rolling demonstrations.

They are health workers who are not doctors or nurses.

One of the first pickets has been outside Hutt Hospital, with workers chanting and holding signs, and getting lots of beeps of support from passing cars.

Social worker Lorraine Tetley said her team was losing social workers to higher paid jobs in the public sector.

Those left behind felt undervalued, she said.

“They’re essential workers who work on the frontline during the pandemic. Every day we work with risk and we work with vulnerable families and we’re not paid fairly for the work we do,” she said.

Working hard under covid
Dental therapist Char Blake said they had been working really hard, especially after the lockdown and covid restrictions.

“We love caring for patients but is just really hard to pay for things with the price of things going up and we’ve waited 18 months for a pay rise,” Blake said.

Today’s allied health workers strike. Video: RNZ News

Her service was six people short, and in danger of losing more.

“It can be quite stressful at times — we have to do more than we are supposed to at times. We don’t want to let our patients down,” she said.

Jane McWhirter tests newborn babies’ hearing and says she is earning the same amount as her 16-year-old daughter who works at Dominoes Pizza.

She says even though she is training on the job, she is doing important, skilled work and she and her colleagues deserves better.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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The anti-mandate protests in New Zealand’s capital Wellington and around the country have also contained a strong anti-media sentiment with reporters abused and threatened.

But one far-right activist has gone a step further and as part of a targeted attack on the media has published a graphic image of public executions of Nazi war criminals.

The disturbing image shows a dozen Nazi war criminals being hanged following World War II.

It has become a popular meme with the online far-right ecosphere, where it is often accompanied by a caption: “Photograph of Hangings at Nuremberg, Germany. Members of the Media, who lied and misled the German People were executed, right along with Medical Doctors and Nurses who participated in medical experiments using living people as guinea pigs”.

Disinformation Project lead Dr Kate Hannah said the poster’s intention was clear.

“It’s incredibly unsubtle. Even if all they do is march outside… it is still incredibly disturbing, it is still incredibly upsetting to have their work [media and health workers] targeted in such a manner.”

But in a twist of irony — considering the fake news such far-right groups claimed to despise — only one member of the media was actually executed following the war; high-ranking Nazi politician Julius Streicher, publisher of the far-right Der Stürmer tabloid.

And the photo in question was not even taken in Nuremberg — instead it shows executions in Kiev.

‘Hideous media language’
But, errors aside, Dr Hannah said the far-right’s seizing of ill-feeling against the media was cause for concern.

“There has been a concerted effort in these spaces over the last 18 months to frame mainstream media as agents of the state, as the ‘lying press’ which is obviously from lügenpresse which is Nazi terminology for left-wing press,” she said.

“There’s been some hideous language used around journalists — the use of the [word] ‘presstitute’ to describe female journalists.

“So this is very much an attempt to shift the place where people get their information from, from being say the mainstream media to fringe media outlets.”

The ultimate goal of far-right activists was destabilising democracy, Dr Hannah said.

Media commentator Dr Gavin Ellis said there had been a concerted effort to target the foundations of democracy — including freedom of the press.

It was an orchestrated rather than an organised movement, Dr Ellis said, with some of those pulling the strings doing so from a distance.

“Some of these people won’t even be at the protest – their orchestration is behind the scenes. But they are intent on undermining the institutions of democratic government,” he said.

Most protesters not violent
Most protesters were not violent and were simply frustrated with the ongoing effects of the pandemic on their lives.

But they were being harnessed by far more nefarious actors, and their anger at the media was a case of shooting the messenger, he said.

“That’s a large part of it — that reality flies in the face of what they stand for. So they forge their own alternate reality and anything that doesn’t match that worldview that they might have is seen as not only wrong, but inherently malevolent — that the truth is something that must not be tolerated,” Dr Ellis said.

While the anger directed at the media was unprecedented in New Zealand, he did not believe it was based on any genuine criticism of the current health or quality of the industry.

However, he feared such tactics could have a chilling effect on the media and journalists, and reporters must continue to do their work in the face of such intimidation.

The other aspect of using such imagery was how offensive it was to victims of Nazi persecution.

Disgusted by poster
Holocaust Centre of New Zealand chair Deborah Hart said she was disgusted by the poster.

There was no comparison of the rollout of a potentially life-saving vaccine by the New Zealand government to the industrial murder of six millions Jews and millions of others by the Nazis, Hart said.

“The Nuremberg trials where military tribunals after World War II for senior Nazis who participated in the Holocaust. To compare that to the vaccine mandates is ridiculous,” she said.

“The intention of these two things was different; the scale was different; the policies were different; and the outcomes were profoundly different.”

It is also worth noting that where possible Hitler withheld vaccines from populations the Nazis persecuted.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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