INTRODUCTION
                                                             

The idea for this book crystallized while watching Amazing Grace, the film about William Wilberforce’s fight to abolish the British slave trade. When contemplating giving up after the abolition bill fails, his friend tells him, “If there’s a bad taste in your mouth, you spit it out. You don’t keep swallowing it.”

This book is an act of spitting out bitter truths. Making sense of what is happening is difficult. The sheer volume of images, data, and headlines creates overload, leaving us numb. It works like a TENS device—a back-pain treatment that floods nerves with electrical signals, drowning out the body’s ability to register pain. In the same way, each new tragedy overwhelms our emotional and mental systems. We become scattered and exhausted, unable to process what we see, let alone act. This book is an attempt to slow down, to take a step back, and delve deeper into the ongoing disaster. Take a moment to reflect, rather than react to the latest attack on health. 

The book’s subtitle comes from Majed Jaber, 25 years, newly graduated Gazan doctor who was supposed to continue his training in the UK when the onslaught on Gaza begun. Displaced to Al Mawasi, he survived a drone strike and works at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis where he describes children so malnourished they are “skeletons draped in skin”, many too weak to chew food or even digest their mother’s milk. Doctors must make impossible choices: which child receives the last vial of a drug? All aid is blocked and even basic lab tests are rationed. 

In August 2025, during a livestream from Gaza, Dr Jaber explained: “What is happening in Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis — it is a deliberate dismantling of life. We are trying to keep people alive with empty hands, a stethoscope, and whatever sense we have left.” Before having to escape mid-session to flee from bombs falling near his tent in the makeshift refugee camp.

By telling these stories, this book bears witness to the courage and endurance of those who heal amid destruction. It stands as a record for history, a testimony against forgetting, and a refusal to let the lives, dreams, and sacrifices of Gaza’s medical workers be reduced to mere statistics. Through data, research and personal stories, Healthcare is not a target hopes to create a clearer understanding of the patterns emerging. It paints a grim picture of the Israeli army that has systematically turned hospitals, ambulances, doctors, and patients into military objectives. Not as accidents of war or collateral damage, but by policy choices, planned and carried out with intent. It examines how Palestinian healthcare systems have been systematically targeted and dismantled as part of a broader strategy of oppression: a deliberate attack on life itself.

This book contains material that many readers will find deeply disturbing. Some of what follows can clash sharply with familiar narratives, pre-existing attachments and long held beliefs. Confronting that tension may resemble the stages of grief one enters if a trusted and beloved family member is found to have committed atrocities. Often leading to alternating between denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and perhaps at one point acceptance. I apologise in advance to those who find the tone of this book either too cautious or too caustic. The goal is an honest effort to assemble the evidence and reveal the structure it forms. There is however no expectation of blind trust: at the end of each chapter, you will find access to sources and video playlists so you can read, hear, and see the evidence for each claim for yourself. 

I also apologise for the weight of the stories that follow. They are bleak and will contain distressing accounts and images of violence. They are included not to sensationalize, but to bear witness. And when the full picture has been laid out, this book ends with concrete steps you can take—should you choose—to refuse despair and act.

TABLE OF CONTENT

Part I    The Architecture of Inequality

This section traces the historical, legal, and institutional frameworks that have enabled systematic discrimination for decades. It shows how inequality in health is not accidental but engineered through policy.

Part II     SYSTEMS OF ERASURE

Mapping how violence is enacted on bodies, infrastructure, and daily life — from bombs to blockade, from chronic illness to engineered scarcity. Together, they form a landscape where destruction becomes routine and survival becomes exceptional.

Part III     The Walls of Silence

The role of censorship, propaganda, legal obstruction, and institutional silence to limit information and punish dissent. These walls ensure that injustice continues unchallenged, hidden behind manufactured doubt.