Free Dr. Mohamed Abu Salmiya!

We continue to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and American divestment from the systems of occupation and apartheid which have robbed the Palestinian people of the chance for healthy and safe lives for 75 years. 

We write today to demand the immediate release of Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya and the doctors and nurses in Al Shifa hospitals, whose arrests on November 23, like thousands of Palestinian political prisoners (hundreds of them children), were baseless. Dr. Abu Salmiya bravely served as director of the Al-Shifa hospital, where our colleagues have made heroic efforts to save lives since this genocide began. The WHO has documented over 181 Israeli attacks on Palestinian healthcare resulting in hundreds of deaths in the last month, which Israel has yet to produce a shred of evidence to support. We additionally demand that his unlawful administrative detention be ended!

We are united in our opposition to the indefensible and inhumane attacks on healthcare, which have been a central feature of Israel’s recent assault of Gaza. We join the UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, WFP and WHO and Doctors without Borders in demanding ceasefire and humanitarian relief at scale in Gaza. A “humanitarian” pause is a contradiction in terms. Israel has created a humanitarian catastrophe by decimating the civilian and health infrastructure and cutting water, food and fuel. As OXFAM points out, “International Humanitarian Law (IHL) strictly prohibits the use of starvation as a method of warfare.” 

The arrest of our colleague is just the latest outrage in six weeks of genocidal destruction of Gaza’s most essential infrastructure and targeted attacks against healthcare workers. As our colleague Dr. Mads Gilbert of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said: “A tragedy is when something bad happens that was not intentional like… when a child falls off a chair and has a brain concussion - that’s a tragedy. This is a man made evil, this is planned to the least detail, it’s meant to inflict what we see, this is the most brutal type of abuse of power that you can imagine.”

We condemn attacks on healthcare, demand the immediate release of Dr. Abu Salmiya and join the UN Special rapporteurs in demanding an end to genocide, and end to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and “reparation, restitution and reconstruction, towards full justice for Palestinians.”