British Medics Urge PM to Stop Arms Sales to Israel
![Activists drop a banner from Westminster Bridge, calling on Labor leader Keir Starmer to say he'll end arms sales to Israel if he becomes prime minister, on 3 June 2024, in London, Uk [Luca Marino]](https://en.minanews.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IMG_20240825_103542.jpg)
London, MINA – Thirty British medical professionals have written to Prime Minister Keir Starmer urges him to end the UK’s role in the “unimaginable cruelty” unfolding in Gaza and halt arms sales to Israel, Middle East Monitor reported.
The doctors, nurses, surgeons and medical professionals outlined their experiences while volunteering in Gaza, highlighting that they “are among the only neutral observers who have been permitted to enter the Gaza Strip since 7 October. With international journalists being targeted and denied access to Gaza, our eyewitness experiences have to serve in the place of journalistic or investigative accounts.”
“It is impossible to know the true death toll in Gaza,” they said, explaining that the Ministry of Health figure of 40,000 Palestinians killed refers only to the number of identified bodies, “but while working in Gaza we bore witness to untold numbers of identified bodies unidentified bodies, many of them truly unidentifiable due to the extent of damage caused.”
Medical treatment was being administered in unsanitary hospitals that lacked “supplies, water, and medications including antibiotics,” they explained, adding that all medical centers in Gaza were overcrowded. All this meant “surgical incisions were almost certain to become infected.”
“Those of us who work with pregnant women regularly see still-births and maternal deaths that would be easily preventable in any functioning healthcare system.”
In spite of the “raging” epidemics in Gaza, they explained: “Israel has not stopped bombarding civilians in their tents or displacing the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, approximately half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available. This is a horrifying reality. It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonia.”
Healthcare staff continue to work but are “malnourished, and both physically and mentally devastated.” Many, the medics explained, had also been detained by Israeli occupation forces, sometimes for several weeks or months. “Almost all reported experience of physical and psychological abuse, mistreatment including torture and sexual abuse including being stripped naked, and other cruel and inhumane punishments – punishments given them solely for their being doctors.”
All of us treated children who seemed to have been deliberately targeted by military violence.
They said recounting the scenes they witnessed in Gaza were “difficult” but “the knowledge that many of the injuries we treated may have resulted from the use of weapons systems and components supplied from Britain” only added to this.
Addressing both Prime Minister Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy they stressed: “If you have seen, heard, and experienced the things we have, there would be no question of placing an arms embargo on Israel.”
In addition to ending Britain’s military support for the attacks on Gaza, they called for crossings into Gaza to be opened “to unfettered aid delivery”, while unrestricted access to the Gaza Strip must be created for medical and surgical professionals, the delivery of immunization programs must be ensured and 20 liters of potable water must be provided to each individual every day as a minimum, they explained.
“Every day that the United Kingdom continues supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that the Palestinian men, women and children of Gaza are killed and maimed by weapons, including those manufactured in the UK,” they concluded. (T/RE1/P2)
Mi’raj News Agency)MINA)
