Letters to the Editor

Raising our Voices for Peace

“For one year, Israel’s allies have continued to provide their military support to Israel, as children are killed en masse, tanks fire on deconflicted shelters and fighter jets bomb so-called humanitarian zones”, says Chis Lockyear, MSF (Médicine Sans Frontières) Secretary General. “This has been accompanied by a consistent public narrative dehumanizing people in Gaza and failing to distinguish between military targets and civilian lives. The only way to stop the killing is with an immediate and sustained ceasefire”. 
As physicians working in this Region, we wish to raise our voices and encourage greater dialogue and awareness about current events in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. We have friends and colleagues throughout these lands. Inthe last year we have watched in horror as the Israeli military, under the cover of an ostensibly just war against Hamas and an attempt to free its hostages, has enacted collective punishment against the people of Gaza. We write this letter with anguished hearts and a deep yearning for peace and safety for all people. 
We have deep sympathy for the trauma caused by the Hamas-led attacks of Oct 7, 2023 to the people of Israel and Jews around the world, many of whom are descendants of holocaust survivors. Our commitment to anti-semitism is absolute and unconditional. At the same time we agree with the words of UN General Secretary António Guterres that this attack “did not happen in a vacuum”. For more than 75 years, the State of Israel has continuously displaced, dispossessed, imprisoned, intimidated, and murdered Palestinians, appropriating land, property, and resources, while denying refugees the right to return to their land. 
Particularly poignant for us as physicians, we decry the destruction of the health infrastructure in Gaza, the imprisonment, torture, and murder of hundreds of health workers, and the blockage of delivery of food and medicines to the civilian population. Israel’s actions since the tragic loss of human life on Oct 7, 2023, have resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths among Palestinians, with women and children predominating, and thousands of child amputations, and children orphaned. Many estimate that the civilian death toll is much higher, perhaps approaching two hundred thousand (as suggested by a recent article in the British medical journal The Lancet), with many still buried under the rubble and dying of preventable causes such as communicable disease and treatable health conditions. 
By this point it is clear to all who have been following this catastrophe that Israel’s actions are not primarily about self-defence, nor do they serve the interests of the remaining Israeli hostages. Rather, under the cover of war, the Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed; we are witnessing a genocide. This has never been more clear than with the images and personal testimony emerging from the North of Gaza since the beginning of October 2024. Even many genocide scholars who were initially reticent to apply the term to the situation, such as Israeli scholar Omer Bartov, have in recent months agreed that genocide is the appropriate term. 
As physicians we have reached out to organizations representing the practice of medicine nationally in Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, as well as NOSM University to which we are affiliated as faculty, and others, to make public statements on behalf of our physician and health colleagues in Gaza, to speak to the sanctity of access to health care, and more generally to speak on behalf of civilians facing starvation and genocide. Their voice, along with many important institutional voices in Canada, have fallen silent on this. Most Canadians do not understand the scale of the horror unfolding daily, the unthinkable precedents that are being set, nor our complicity in it. 
As we contemplate these matters, we also bear in mind what First Nations locally have taught us about Canada’s colonial history, its impacts, and its lessons. Human rights and armed conflict and human health are bound together in all places and at all times. 
Never again means never again for anyone. 

Dr. Justin Bell, CCFP
Dr. Megan Bollinger, CCFP
Dr. Mara Boyle, CCFP
Dr. Claudette Chase, CCFP
Dr. Mary England, CCFP
Dr. Terri Farrell, CCFP
Dr. Lianne Gerber Finn, CCFP
Dr. Marilyn Koval, CCFP
Dr. Kalyna Kryworuchko, CCFP
Dr. Sharen Madden, CCFP
Dr. Brodie Marshall, CCFP
Dr. Alanna Morgan, CCFP
Dr. N. Panu, FRCP
Dr. Anne Robinson, CCFP
Dr. Yang Sheng, CCFP
Dr. Yoko Schreiber - FRPC
Dr. Larry Willms, CCFP
Dr. Catherine Wong, CCFP

For those interested, you are invited to a Vigil for Public Grieving and Uniting for Peace on Sunday, November 10th, 4-5 pm, St. Andrew’s United Church Peace Park, Sioux Lookout.

We will also discuss more suggestions regarding actions we might take.