Since October 2023, Gaza’s healthcare system has been systematically dismantled. Hospitals have been bombed, raided, and rendered inoperable. Beyond the unprecedented destruction of physical infrastructure, Israeli forces have killed, injured, and detained hundreds of medical professionals—doctors, nurses, and paramedics—who form the backbone of any functioning health system. This assault has left over two million people without access to even the most basic medical care. The collapse is not incidental—it is deliberate, structural, and sustained, with consequences that will endure long after the immediate violence ends.

This lecture will address the condition of Gaza’s healthcare system before October 2023, and the essential role it played under siege, the direct and repeated attacks on hospitals, clinics, and medical infrastructure, the systematic obstruction of medical evacuations for critically ill and wounded patients, the detention and abuse of over 230 Palestinian medical workers—many still held under conditions tantamount to torture, and the complicity of Israel’s medical community—through silence, inaction, or endorsement—in facilitating this collapse and the global implications of this crisis: What does it mean for the protection of medical professionals worldwide when such violations are met with impunity?

Afterwards Donna Muller (psychiatrist and researcher) will share the results of her study among psychiatry residents in the Netherlands, which examines how the situation in Palestine is addressed in the workplace and the broader implications of these dynamic.

About Guy Shalev

Guy Shalev, Ph.D., Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI). Dr. Shalev is a medical and political anthropologist specializing in the intersections of medical professionalism, ethnonational politics, and bioethics in Israel/Palestine. PHRI is an Israel-based human rights organization committed to advancing the right to health for all under Israel's control. PHRI documents human rights violations and advocates for the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, individuals lacking legal status in Israel, people in Israeli incarceration facilities, and residents of Israel's social and geographic periphery. In its work, PHRI focuses on structural infringements of the right to health while providing free healthcare and humanitarian aid to thousands of people annually.