Pro-Palestine doctors express solidarity with Gazans in protest held at US Capitol
Doctors Against Genocide have expressed their solidarity with Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip in a protest held at the US Capitol, calling for an immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade to ease the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Palestinian territory.
Dozens of people from to the Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) assembled at the US Capitol on Wednesday in a protest gathering to urge members of Congress to support an immediate and lasting ceasefire, the removal of the Israeli blockade, and the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, where over a million children face starvation and disease, Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency reported.
“Bread Not Bombs!”, “Let The Children Eat!” the doctors shouted at the Hart Building, while holding bread, the report added.
DAG is a global coalition of healthcare workers who fight against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The Israeli regime’s “deliberate malnutrition, starvation and attack on health care in Gaza has worsened and potentially portends extermination of masses of the Gaza population, particularly tens of thousands of children,” said Karameh Kuemmerle, a Boston-based pediatric neurologist.
Israel halted all aid deliveries to Gaza after it broke a two-month ceasefire agreement on March 18, barring the entry of all humanitarian aid, which, according to the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), has driven Gaza’s population toward phase 5 Famine.
Phase 5 Famine is the highest phase of the IPC Acute Food Insecurity scale, and is classified when an area has the deaths of two people or four children for every 10,000 people each day due to outright starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
According to Dr. Brennan Bollman, another American physician who just returned from Gaza, there has been “zero aid and zero food” for eight weeks.
“My Palestinian health care worker colleagues demonstrated something for which I have no word, because it goes beyond compassion, beyond skillful dedication, beyond courage. They lost their family members and returned to work the following day,” she added.
Bollman demanded an “immediate and permanent” ceasefire in Gaza, stressing that healthcare workers in Gaza “need food, for their patients and for themselves; they need this illegal and unconscionable blockade to end.”
The development comes as the UN World Food Programme has already reported that its food supplies in Gaza are now entirely depleted. This is while the 2.4 million people of Gaza depend almost entirely on humanitarian assistance.
Since October 2023, at least 52,400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed. In response to the scale of the violence, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The occupying entity also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
