Every time that Israel has attacked Gaza since 2006, the Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, has volunteered to treat wounded men, women and children at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital.
A veteran anesthetist, Gilbert also commands exceptional skills as a writer and photographer. His new book Night in Gaza is a shocking record in words and pictures of his clinical experiences during Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza during the summer of 2014.
The book has photographs of Gilbert enjoying the company of Palestinian colleagues. But most of its images are sombre. One shows 4 dead ten-year old boys laid out on stretchers covered with the yellow Fatah flag and about to be buried with grieving relatives in attendance. The text explains that an Israeli gunboat or aircraft fired a shell at the boys who were playing on the beach at Gaza City’s fishing harbor. Occurring under the noses of the international press, the incident made headlines but Gilbert wonders how many such atrocities went unnoticed. He wonders too what would have happened had Palestinian soldiers killed 4 Israeli boys on a beach in Tel Aviv. Would not the western media have emoted about terrorism more than ever?

Gilbert evokes the nightmare endured by the staff of Al-Shifa Hospital, as they struggled to cope with an overwhelming influx of victims of Israeli bombing and missile attacks, not a few of them children and babies afflicted with life-threatening burns. His book underlines the official statistics: 2,220 Palestinians killed as against 71 Israelis, 1,492 of them believed to be civilians (of whom 551 were children); 11,231 wounded, including 3,374 children, with up to a 1,000 expected to be permanently disabled.
Gilbert is aghast that Israel has taken to bombing hospitals and schools as well as residential buildings. What is especially hard for him to take is that the cataclysm confronting Gaza’s medical service was entirely avoidable. How can all this death and destruction be understood except on the assumption that Israel’s message to the people of Gaza is: Go — or die? On July 19, 2014, Israeli artillery rained own 7,000 high-explosive shells on the Shuja’iyya district of Gaza City. According to US military sources, 4,800 were fired in just seven hours. In the opinion of a high-ranking US officer, “the only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a time as possible.”
Testimony to his own humanitarian instincts, Gilbert’s book also bears witness to the barely credible resilience of the people of Gaza. One of its chapters focuses on Nashwa, a trainee Gazan gynecologist and obstetrician who was about to go on a scholarship to London, though with the intention of returning home as soon as he has finished her course. Gilbert asked her if she was not discouraged by Gaza’s difficulties. Replying that adversity “makes us stronger,” she quoted the words of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish: “We Palestinians suffer from a chronic illness of hope.”
Gilbert confesses that he is not neutral. With Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he believes that if you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor. It is a stance that has led the Israeli authorities to class him as a security threat and ban him from entering Gaza via Israel. His wry retort is that only a regime afraid of the truth could regard someone carrying a pen, a stethoscope and a camera as a threat.
Israel cannot muzzle Mads Gilbert, but it can depend on the mainstream western media to deny his book the publicity it deserves. It is not Night in Gaza that has been in the UK news this summer but the UN report on the 2014 Gaza war which (in media summaries) conveys that Israel and Hamas alike may have committed war crimes in Gaza — a verdict that deflects public attention from Israel’s obscenely disproportionate response to rocket attacks from an over-crowded strip of land that, thanks to vindictive Israeli policy, remains a desperately impoverished prison camp.
There are many reasons for radicalization but not the least of them is the perception that for the west Palestinian lives — like human lives throughout the Muslim world — do not matter.

SOURCE:   http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/776731