MSF accuses Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in the Gaza Strip in a report documenting the 14-month conflict published on Thursday.

The report documents 41 attacks on MSF staff including air strikes on health facilities and direct fire on humanitarian convoys.

The NGO said it was forced to evacuate hospitals and health centres on 17 occasions.

“We are seeing clear signs of ethnic cleansing as Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped and bombed,” said Christopher Lockyear, MSF’s secretary general.

Israel has repeatedly rejected accusations that its campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide.

MSF’s report, entitled “Gaza: Life in a Death Trap”, said the siege of the Palestinian territory has drastically reduced humanitarian aid, with only 37 trucks authorised daily in October 2024, compared with 500 before the conflict.

The north of the territory, particularly the Jabalia camp, has been undergoing an “extremely violent” offensive since early October, MSF said.

The NGOs medical teams have carried out more than 27,500 consultations and 7,500 surgical operations in one year. They note a rapid spread of disease in a population that had been 90 percent displaced and living in wretched conditions.

The organisation also denounced the blocking of medical evacuations, with Israel having authorised only 1.6 percent of requests between May and September 2024.

“What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organisations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza,” said Lockyear.

The report calls for an immediate ceasefire and the lifting of the siege to allow the massive delivery of humanitarian aid.

MSF also called on “states, particularly Israel’s closest allies, to end their unconditional support for Israel and fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza”.

In a separate report published Thursday, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing “acts of genocide” in the Gaza Strip by deliberately restricting Palestinians’ access to water.

The war in Gaza was tiggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Since then, Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 45,097 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.