Introduction by Croakey: An Amnesty International investigation has found sufficient evidence to conclude that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip between 7 October 2023 and July 2024, according to a report released today.
The report, titled ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’, documents how “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” since the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the five acts are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The investigation is based on Amnesty International’s field and desk research into violations perpetrated by Israel in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024, as well as interviews with 212 people including Palestinian witnesses and survivors.
Amnesty found a pattern of conduct indicating genocidal intent included, but not limited to, repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and the continuous refusal to allow adequate humanitarian aid and other essentials to reach people in Gaza in the face of international condemnation and legally binding orders by the International Court of Justice. Read the full Amnesty International report here.
Meanwhile, a local group, Australian Healthcare Workers for Palestine, calls on healthcare and research organisations to urgently consider their collaborations with Israeli organisations, saying they “signal tacit endorsement of Israel’s policies and behaviours vis-à-vis the Palestinian population it illegally occupies, and provide critical social and political license to a state plausibly accused of carrying out a genocide”.
Australian Healthcare Workers for Palestine write:
Last weekend, healthcare workers across Australia joined forces with Amnesty Australia in a powerful weekend of protests and actions to honour and stand in solidarity with the 1,055 Palestinian healthcare workers who have lost their lives and the 310 currently detained in Israeli prisons.
The message is clear: healthcare is not a target. Hospitals are not a target. Under international humanitarian law, medical neutrality must be upheld during armed conflict. All healthcare personnel, facilities, and transport must be protected, ensuring that doctors and healthcare workers can safely carry out their ethical duty to provide impartial care to anyone in need.
Combatants have a legal and moral obligation to avoid harm to medical staff and facilities. Australian healthcare workers demand that these principles be respected to protect healthcare’s sanctity in times of conflict.
Ethical obligations
Meanwhile, healthcare organisations have both an ethical and legal obligation to assess their work through the lens of human rights. This includes evaluating institutional collaborations to ensure that partners adhere to international humanitarian and human rights law.
When partners include public sector institutions whose governments have been found to systematically violate human rights, organisations may be obliged to terminate such relationships – even in the absence of official sanctions.
The ongoing collaboration between Australia’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Sheba Medical Centre in Israel, for example, raises serious questions about the duty of healthcare and research organisations to cut ties with a country acting in clear violation of international law (the collaboration is detailed in this 2022 article).
Collaborations of this nature bear ramifications beyond clinical, technological or economic advancement that should be carefully considered by leaders of any Australian institution yet to cut ties with Israel.
International partnerships with Israeli institutions signal tacit endorsement of Israel’s policies and behaviours vis-à-vis the Palestinian population it illegally occupies, and provide critical social and political license to a state plausibly accused of carrying out a genocide.
Medicide
The current period of violent conflict from October 2023 to the present is the most deadly and destructive episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by orders of magnitude.
Israel’s actions in Gaza subsequent to the events of October 7th have been adjudicated as a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice and recognised as such by experts in International Humanitarian Law, including the current UN Special Rapporteur (on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967), leading human rights and humanitarian organisations, and countless internationally renowned scholars, including many Jewish and Israeli scholars (see further reading below).
In the wake of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, coined the term “medicide” to describe Israel’s policy of deliberately targeting patients, healthcare workers, and essential health infrastructure throughout the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).
In October 2024, an independent UN Commission concluded that Israel had enacted a policy to intentionally destroy Gaza’s healthcare system. The commission found that Israel had deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel, targeted medical facilities and vehicles in violation of international humanitarian law, and restricted permits to leave the territory for medical treatment, comprising the war crimes of wilful killing and mistreatment and the crime against humanity of extermination.
As a result of Israel’s sustained and deliberate assault on the right to health itself, the healthcare system in Gaza has essentially collapsed, leaving an already vulnerable population in profound crisis.
Israel has long denied Palestinians their human right to health in the occupied Palestine territory. In 2022, life expectancy was around 10 years higher in Israel than in Gaza, and infant mortality was four times higher in the occupied Palestine territory than in Israel.
Israel’s military occupation of Gaza, including a near total siege of the territory over the past 18 years, has left the Palestinian health system unable to provide essential services, with persistent shortages of essential medicines, personnel, facilities and health technologies.
Most of the population is at risk, especially patients with chronic disease who need specialised health services and are unable to access high-quality, timely treatment.
At the same time, Israel has imposed severe restrictions on patients exiting Gaza to obtain essential medical care, including arbitrary delay and denial of permits for patients and their companions, and complicated and lengthy procedures for obtaining outside medical referrals.
In 2016, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, reported that Israel had routinely denied or simply ignored around 25 percent of all requests to transfer patients in Gaza to Israel or the West Bank for treatment.
With respect to cancer, surgery is the main intervention in Gaza (usually resulting from the lack of other options) – more than 85 percent of which is conducted without adjuvant or neoadjuvant chemotherapy due to the unavailability of these drugs.
Similarly, radioisotopes and radioactive substances essential for standard diagnosis and radiotherapy services have long been restricted from entering the Gaza Strip.
For more than a year, there has been essentially no active treatment for Gaza’s 10,000 cancer patients, including pain relief for palliative care, and new diagnoses have almost totally stopped. International research partnerships aspiring to advance cancer care cannot simply ignore this critical context.
Legal obligations
Australian healthcare institutions are obligated to comply with national and international human rights frameworks irrespective of whether the Australian Government has imposed sanctions on a partner country.
With respect to international law, organisations are explicitly obligated to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestine territory.
Engaging in institutional partnerships with a state plausibly accused of such crimes represents a significant risk to organisational directors who may be held liable for breaching international law.
Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Sara Dehm, notes that Australian businesses may bear “individual criminal responsibility before the International Criminal Court (ICC)” if they’re shown to be complicit in genocide, which can be as simple as “providing material, political, and even moral support to the commission of genocide”.
Domestically, the licence to conduct human health research in Australia is predicated upon adherence to ethical research practices as spelled out in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, which are intended to be consistent with international human rights instruments ratified by Australia.
Similarly, domestic Australian law ensures the rights to life and equal access to healthcare without discrimination.
Values and reputation
Australian healthcare and research organisations partnering with a regime that violates international law signal to the wider community that apartheid, genocide and other war crimes are not only tolerated, but supported by their members.
Notwithstanding potential legal liability, Australian organisations that partner with Israel violate their own stated values. Such disregard for human rights risks permanent reputational damage, compromising organisations’ ability to attract and retain value-driven talent, and jeopardising future partnerships with organisations that maintain strict ethical standards.
Partnerships with human rights violators do more than just damage a health organisation’s carefully curated reputation for benevolence. Maintaining ties to states that actively target academics and healthcare workers – individuals upon whom health and research institutions depend – communicates that non-Western lives hold little value compared to the purported commercial and technological benefit of an unethical partnership.
Such messaging can severely harm organisational culture by undermining members’ sense of cultural safety, eroding workplace morale, cohesion and productivity – changes that can fundamentally unravel the fabric of an institution over time.
Leaders seeking to improve health outcomes through mutually beneficial collaborations should ensure that patient care is delivered by partners equitably and never on the preferential basis of race or ethnicity.
As the occupying power, Israel is legally obligated to ensure the provision of healthcare to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, yet it intentionally and systematically denies such essential services to Palestinians in the occupied territory as part of a deliberate and strategic intent to harm this population.
Given the extent of Israel’s documented human rights violations in Palestine – and the growing international scrutiny of these crimes – Australian healthcare and research organisations face significant legal and reputational risks by maintaining commercial ties with Israeli institutions.
As key national institutions and global leaders in health research, Australian healthcare and research organisations must send the message that human rights are non-negotiable in modern healthcare collaborations.
While medical research partnerships can advance scientific knowledge, they also confer legitimacy and provide economic and technological benefits to the respective countries involved.
By withdrawing from partnerships with Israel, Peter MacCallum and other organisations collaborating with Israeli organisations can align their actions with international law, embody their own organisational values, exercise corporate social responsibility, and create meaningful pressure for positive change.
Declaration
The authors are members of Healthcare Workers for Palestine and the Australian Nurses Midwives Federation (ANMF). The authors do not work at Peter MacCallum (Peter Mac) Cancer Hospital. They have asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions.
Right of response
On 2 December, Croakey asked Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre to respond to concerns raised in this article, sending a list of specific questions, including whether the MoU with Sheba Medical Centre is still active, or whether it is being reviewed, or whether there plans to review it. The Centre acknowledged our email but did not say whether they would provide a response.
On 5 December, ahead of publication, we again approached Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre for a comment, but this was declined.
Further reading
Segal, R. (13 October 2023). A textbook case of genocide. Jewish Currents.
Gordon, N. (17 July 2024). A legal justification for genocide. Jewish Currents.
Goldberg, A. (April 18th 2024). Yes, it is genocide. The Palestine Project.
Sachs, J. (January 1st 2024). Saving Israel by endings it war in Gaza. Common Dreams.
From social media
See Croakey’s archive of articles on conflict and war
