MSF doctors suspend West Bank operations due to Israeli pogrom

The Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF) charity has suspended its operations in the West Bank because of Israel’s intensified pogrom in the occupied territory.

In a statement, MSF says that the suspension comes because Israeli attacks and blockades are making it impossible to reach patients and depriving whole communities of care:

For 10 days, Palestinians in Hebron and surrounding communities have faced military raids, forced evictions, arrests, demolitions of houses and businesses and severe movement restrictions, with disastrous consequences for their access to healthcare.

Many people were prevented from reaching medical facilities, while healthcare workers and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff were unable to reach patients. It is unacceptable that entire communities are being deprived of healthcare because of sweeping movement restrictions. Israeli authorities must stop imposing restrictive policies which amount to collective punishment and ethnic cleansing.

Terror targets

Earlier this year, Israel banned MSF from working in Gaza as part of its genocide and ethnic cleansing of the strip. The colony’s UKLFI lawfare attack group is now trying to have MSF banned in the UK as ‘terrorists’, using the same tactics with which it targeted UN refugee agency UNRWA – Israel’s unsubstantiated propaganda claims that MSF employees had ties to terrorist groups. MSF denied the smears, describing them as a “disinformation campaign”.

MSF doctors are being attacked in the West Bank by Israeli ethno-supremacist ‘settler’ terrorists.

The charity says that in just four days just after Israel’s latest lockdown and pogrom began on 23 October, “at least 380 patients across five mobile clinic locations” were denied treatment – and that the impacts of Israel’s criminality are community-wide:

These communities depend on our services for essential medicines, treatment of chronic diseases and mental healthcare. At the same time, restrictions on the movement of medical supplies threaten to deepen existing shortages in an already strained health system. Patients with chronic illnesses, including cancer, face further uncertainty over access to essential treatment.

Beyond the obstruction of healthcare and reduced humanitarian access exacerbated by the military operation, the lockdown left thousands of Palestinians living in fear and uncertainty. Approximately 3,300* people were forcibly displaced, with some families given just one hour to leave their homes, carrying only a single bag and nowhere safe to go.

This lockdown comes on top of escalating settler violence, increased attacks on Palestinian communities during the olive harvest and the expansion of illegal settlements and outposts across the West Bank, further spreading a climate of fear and insecurity in which Palestinians are forced to live.

Israel is a terror state and Zionism is racism. UK media are, yet again, ignoring news that exposes Israel’s crimes.

Header image: MSF.