The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as specific acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. One of these acts includes deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.
Earlier this week, the Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) published a report on the “deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems,” demonstrating how these actions are consistent with the UN’s definition of genocide. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a parallel report on Israel’s broader actions in Gaza, which the organization also concludes constitutes a genocide.
Over 80,000 children and civilians have been killed in Gaza as casualties of war, related to military violence, blockades of aid deliveries, severed access to healthcare, displacement and starvation. As per PHRI’s report, “(h)ospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical personnel have been systematically targeted, rendered non-functional, or killed”, including over 1580 medical personnel killed, which in addition to causing immediate suffering “profoundly undermine(s) Gaza’s long-term recovery prospects.”
PHRI has called on health and humanitarian communities worldwide to take action, and both organizations are calling on world leaders “to use every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.”
As an organization of physicians concerned with the protection of human life and well-being, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment is deeply alarmed at the escalating humanitarian and hunger crisis in Gaza. We stand alongside other health professionals and organizations in calling for an end to genocidal acts in Palestine. Israel’s response to the deadly attacks of October 7, 2023 has had grossly disproportionate impacts on Palestinians.
We call on the Government of Canada to uphold its 2024 motion to end all military exports to Israel, implement a full, two-way arms embargo, implement appropriate sanctions, and to take an unequivocal position in opposition to Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian civilians.
The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment further decries the devastating impacts of military conflicts on human health and safety more broadly, in Gaza and elsewhere in the world. This includes direct harms to human lives alongside longer-term human health impacts due to the destruction and contamination of ecosystems, biodiversity and natural resources and climate impacts. In some cases, the intentional or unintentional environmental damage caused by military action can make regions virtually unlivable for years to come, a scale of environmental destruction termed “ecocide”.