Thank you all for coming to this event which we hold every month outside Wellington Regional Hospital Ngā Puna Wairoa, organised by Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine. As you might notice, I am not Serena Moran. The Chairperson of our group is currently away on holiday so I am stepping in. My name is Grant Brookes. I’m a Mental Health Nurse here in Wellington, and it’s my task after our opening karakia to offer some thoughts about what’s been going on over the last month.
I’m sure that many of us here have been glued to our screens for the last 24-48 hours, following the progress of those brave souls on the Global Sumud Flotilla – and thinking in particular of young Samuel Leason, and our Kiwi compatriots Yousef Sammour and Rana Hamida. As of right now, we’re still in the dark about their safety, somewhere in Israel.
But also in the last week, we’ve heard the news about Trump and Netanyahu’s 20-point plan, which has been laughingly described as a “peace plan”.
Just when you thought prospects for people in Gaza could not get any worse, Trump is proposing himself as the chair of a corporate board that will serve as a transitional government in the enclave.
But this isn’t all. Also on board is war criminal Tony Blair, who will reportedly play a significant role in the future government of Gaza. This is colonialism in a region that already knows far too much about that.
Earlier this year, The Tony Blair Institute was part of a project which envisaged rebuilding a post-war Gaza as a trading hub. His plan was for a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”. Hamas, we’ve been told, has been given until today to accept this dystopian future.
We should make no mistake, the future of the whole world is being fought over in Gaza.
Because as Anthony Loewenstein says in his book, The Palestine Laboratory, Israel’s military industrial complex has used the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and methods of control by corporate overlords that then are exported all around the world.
For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling what they term an “enemy” population. Toady, that is the Palestinians. Tomorrow it’s going to be Trump’s “internal enemy” in Democrat-run cities and states across America. And the day after that, for all we know it could be us.
This is just one of the reasons why we continue to stand with Gaza and resist the humiliation and degradation of Palestinians at the hands of the occupation forces and the apartheid state.
As healthcare workers, it is our professional colleagues especially who we stand with.
Over the last week, the world heard from a small team Australian doctors working in Gaza. We heard from the firstly because they went viral on TikTok and then because they were broadcast internationally by Al Jazeera. One of them, Dr Saya Aziz, described her hospital as “like an abattoir”, but then she added that even in an abattoir there are some hygienic methods of killing. Her Australian colleague Dr Nada Abu Alrub said their hospital had zero stock – not even soap for them to wash their hands before tending to patients. “We need to stop the killing”, she said.
That same day she gave that interview to Al Jazeera, a nurse at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Marwan Abdeen, was shot in the head through a hospital window while he was working. Marwan thankfully has survived.
But Omar Hayek, an Occupational Therapist at the MSF field hospital in Deir Al-Balah, was killed in an Israeli strike yesterday. He was waiting in the street for a bus to take him to work. Four other healthcare workers were seriously injured, including a physiotherapist, an orthopaedic surgeon, a supply officer and a finance assistant.
And at the start of this week, the chief nursing officer at Kamal Adwan Medical Complex and the leader of the Palestinian Nursing Association, Dr Akram Al-Kafarneh, was killed by occupation forces.
The World Health Organisation has reported 735 attacks on healthcare in Gaza up until June this year, a number which is undoubtedly conservative.
MSF reports that over 1,500 health workers and hundreds of humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
But as we know, the resistance to Israel’s slaughter and genocide is growing. The massive general strike we saw in Italy last week was an inspiration, in shutting down the ports that supply Israel. Italian unions have called another general strike for next week, and Europeans across the Continent have taken to the streets to protest and blockade today.
Even here in Pōneke, we can celebrate the Academic Senate up at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University voting unanimously last week for the university to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. This win followed a long campaign by members of the Tertiary Education Union and activists with Students for Justice in Palestine.
The result of pressure from these grassroots campaigns is now being seen at the very highest level, with 77 nations walking out on Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Inspired by this, we keep standing up for Gaza, for humanity and indeed for our own future.
So let us now remember our healthcare colleagues murdered by Israel, as well as the hundreds currently in Israeli detention, by reading aloud their names.
Grant Brookes | Nurse & Trade Unionist 