Gaza Health Care Letters uden om medierne direkte fra kilden

Mange mennesker, måske de fleste, får stadig i overvejende grad deres informationer om hvad der foregår i verden gennem medierne. Både gennem de gamle medier og gennem de sociale medier. Men begge disse kilder til viden og information er behæftede med betydelige begrænsninger. Begge fungerer som filtre, så den information der når beskueren, er begrænset, udvalgt og ofte forvansket.

Her vil jeg præsentere en anden kilde. En kilde som supplerer medierne:

Nemlig information, indsigt og viden direkte fra folk som selv har været i det kampområde som medierne forsøger at beskrive.

Gaza Healthcare Letters er skrevet af sundhedspersonale som har været i Gaza og selv oplevet hvordan tingene er.

Deres oplevelser præsenterer de i åbne breve til politikere. Her er deres på nuværende tidspunkt seneste brev, godt en måned gammelt, som er stilet til Præsident Biden i USA og vicepræsident Kamala D. Harris.

Brevet indledes med følgende linjer:

Dear President Biden and Vice President Harris,

We are 99 American physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, nurses, and midwives who have volunteered in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. Combined, we spent 254 weeks volunteering in Gaza’s hospitals and clinics. We worked with various nongovernmental organizations and the World Health Organization in hospitals and clinics throughout the Strip. In addition to our medical and surgical expertise, many of us have a public health background, as well as experience working in humanitarian and conflict zones, including Ukraine during the brutal Russian invasion. Some of us are veterans and reservists. We are a multifaith and multiethnic group. None of us support the horrors committed on October 7 by Palestinian armed groups and individuals in Israel.

Jeg vil anbefale alle selv at læse hele brevet her:

USA Letter | October 2 — Gaza Healthcare Letters

Her vil jeg blot citere nogle passager fra brevet:

This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.

Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.

Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

President Biden and Vice President Harris, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children en masse.

We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.

Sådanne kilder er et meget værdifuldt supplement til mediernes mangelfulde dækning.

Opfordringen herfra skal som altid lyde at undersøge sager bredt og fra så mange forskellige kilder som muligt.