On 31 March 2025, 15 Palestinian aid workers were found buried in a mass grave, along with ambulances and a UN vehicle which had all been crushed. They were victims of an IDF attack a week before. According to The New York Times,
However, footage from the phone of one of the victims was discovered that contradicted their statement. It shows the vehicles with lights and all aid workers wearing high vis clothing. Eyewitnesses reported seeing IDF soldiers shooting at the aid workers from about 50 metres away.An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said earlier this week that Israeli forces did not “randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot. Colonel Shoshani said earlier in the week that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants.
After the footage came out, the IDF said that there had been "professional failures" but rejected claims there had been a cover-up, despite there being a literal covering of the bodies and vehicles and a failure to notify the relevant authorities in Gaza for almost a week.
The documentary opens with this footage and we hear the victim telling his mum "This is the path I chose — to help people".
From there we have interviews with multiple doctors who report the systematic targeting by the IDF of hospitals in Gaza and the targetted assassination and kidnapping of medical staff.
One doctor described how his home was bombed, killing 10 of his family including two brothers who were also doctors. He manages to survive along with his wife and they escape to the street where they are then targeted by a drone. His wife and daughter are killed in this attack.
The documentary references a UN Thematic Report titled 'Attacks on hospitals during the escalation of hostilities in Gaza (7 October 2023 - 30 June 2024)'. They quote this section of the report,
The documentary discusses at length the detention of medical staff, interviewing several doctors who were detained and eventually released (including the doctor mentioned above who lost his family in targeted attacks by the IDF). Anyone who read the Imprisonment section of my post here and the links within will be familiar with the descriptions of torture that the interviewees describe. Stress positions, sexual assault, beatings, fingernails being torn out. One doctor who asked for medical attention was denied it by the doctor, and told by the doctor that if he asked for help again the doctor would kill him.OHCHR monitoring has found that the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) operations on, within and around hospitals generally followed a pattern, with often catastrophic impacts on the functionality of the hospitals and on the lives of those reliant on its services, as well as on those who have lost their homes and were sheltering inside. The IDF’s operations against hospitals generally started with
(a) airstrikes or shelling on the hospitals and/or in the hospital’s vicinity, often resulting in serious damage to the hospitals’ premises and equipment;
(b) besieging the hospitals with ground troops, preventing Palestinians from accessing the hospital and blocking medical supplies;
(c) raiding the hospital with the assistance of heavy machinery, including tanks and bulldozers;
(d) detaining medical staff, patients and their companions, as well as the IDPs sheltering inside the hospital;
(e) forcing remaining patients, IDPs and others to leave the hospital; and finally;
(f) withdrawing troops from the hospital, leaving in their wake severe damage to the structures, buildings and equipment inside, effectively rendering the hospital non-functional.
One anonymous Israeli doctor told how he saw a blindfolded detainee being operated on without consent or anaesthesia.
A soldier who was stationed at Sde Teiman describes how abuse of prisoners wasn't just condoned but encouraged.
Israel claims it's attacking the hospitals because they are either sheltering Hamas or holding hostages. Little to no evidence has been provided for the claims of Hamas using the hospitals but one doctor does admit that he saw hostages at the hospital. However, if Israel was really concerned with the hostages is bombing them really the best way to rescue them?
The anonymous Israeli doctor says that Israel isn't trying to hide what it's doing to Palestinian prisoners. And this is emphasised by footage from a meeting of politicians after the allegations of rape of detainees was made public,
One point that is made in the documentary is that by detaining and killing medical staff, the IDF is making it even harder for Gaza to recover. Buildings can be rebuilt but medical knowledge takes decades to acquire. And at a time when such a large percentage of the population requires complex and ongoing medical care that loss is almost worse than the loss of the infrastructure.Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
A letter published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health at the beginning of this year called child amputees in Gaza "a humanitarian crisis demanding action",
The charity Humanity Inclusion put out a press release last month saying that "Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world", yet,Many of these children will grow up with a war-related disability because their stumps are unable to be surgically prepared for the fitting of prosthetics. Throughout their lives, patients with complicated war-related injuries will typically require eight to twelve surgeries. Numerous procedures must be performed early in the recovery period. Failure to do so might lead to the wound getting infected, loss of the limb, or death if the infection spreads to the patient’s bloodstream. Morbidity and mortality rates among many of these injured children might increase if they do not receive the highly intensive, long- term care they require quickly. As the children grow up, their prosthetics must be resized. Occupational and physical rehabilitation is a necessity for these children, which is currently impossible in Gaza.
If you have any spare money you can donate to their Gaza appeal.According to the WHO's partners, there are currently only nine Prosthetics and Orthotics technicians in the whole of Gaza. Far too few to produce and fit the number of prosthetic devices needed for the thousands of people who have lost limbs.
Back to the documentary.
I have largely avoided watching footage from Gaza. I don't need to see people injured, dying or dead to know what's going on is wrong and I don't like intruding on what is likely the worst day of people's lives. But the documentary, understandably, doesn't shy away from showing the utter carnage that is being caused by the IDF's relentless attacks. Watching it was harrowing. We see a doctor examining children who are clearly starving, and it isn't just heartbreaking but incredibly anger-inducing because this isn't some famine due to failed crops. It's completely intentional and could be ended instantly if Israel just let in the aid that is sitting outside the walls that surround Gaza. We see dead bodies, mercifully blurred to protect what little dignity the people have in death, and children bleeding. We see chaos and confusion and medical staff trying their best to help people despite so few resources. We hear of the IDF intentionally destroying the solar panels on the roof of one hospital and killing someone in the process. We see the aftermath of a hospital ward being bombed, and a doctor returning weeks later and remembering his colleagues who died there. We see doctors forcibly stripped to their underwear and made to sit in a massive earth trench in photos eerily reminiscent of the early days of the holocaust (though at least these modern photos don't end in mass slaughter). We see one doctor who has been forced to evacuate his hospital walking slowly down a street covered in rubble and surrounded by blown out buildings towards an IDF tank. The narrator says that he hasn't been seen since.
The documentary notes that at least a couple of the doctors they focus on have liked social media posts celebrating the attacks on 7/10. There isn't any further exploration of this but honestly I don't think there needs to be. Liking a social media post doesn't permit you to try and kill that person, and it certainly doesn't give you justification to kill their family, destroy their home and genocide their people.
The anonymous Israeli doctor notes that this didn't start on 7/10. That there has been an ongoing dehumanisation of the Palestinian people that has led to people cheering on genocide. The documentary shows an interview with Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister at the Settlement Conference,
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide asThe finance minister addressed the expansion of combat operations in Gaza, saying "within a year we will be able to declare victory in Gaza." According to Smotrich, the goals are that "Gaza will be completely destroyed. All its residents concentrated south of the Morag axis and flowing outward."...
Smotrich said "Israel does not intend to withdraw from territories the IDF captures, not even as part of a deal to release hostages." [my emphasis]
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It has been since before 7/10 but sufficiently slowly to not incur the notice of the wider public who had been convinced that it's really complicated and that you couldn't have an opinion on the situation without having a thorough understanding of the last 150+years of global history. But Israel is no longer hiding their intentions. They want to rid Gaza of Palestinians and they are succeeding.any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This isn't about the hostages. This isn't even retribution for 7/10. This is using 7/10 as cover to complete an extermination that has been decades in the making.
Documentaries like this can and should be used at war crimes trials. But sadly that will be too late for the people of Gaza. We are all watching the most well-documented and widely broadcast genocide in history. And I don't know how to make it stop.