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LAWYERS seeking an order to prevent the United Kingdom government from continuing to grant arms export licences to UK companies selling arms to Israel submitted their case to the High Court in London yesterday.
The lawsuit, which is backed up by 14 witness statements by Palestinian and Western medical doctors, covers more than 100 pages, including descriptions of Palestinians being tortured, left untreated in hospital and unable to escape constant Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
The case has been brought by a number of non-governmental organisations, including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch.
One of the named witnesses, Dr Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, said he treated a patient who had been forced to stand for 48 hours, requiring a skin graft on his heel.
He said he also treated a 60-year-old man who had been stripped naked by Israeli forces, whose wrists had been bound tightly for three days, and who had been dragged on the floor, causing his wrist to be worn down to the bone.
He said: ‘Every part of the healthcare system has been targeted and destroyed and is now completely incapable of providing care. So many people are dying from issues that are completely treatable.’
In another witness statement, Dr Khaled Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College hospital London, said conditions in hospitals on both his trips to Gaza ‘were what I imagine medieval medicine must have been like’.
Many of his patients were victims of sniper fire, he said, adding: ‘I understand that Israel justifies its attacks on hospitals by reference to its claim that the hospitals are overrun by militants but in my four weeks in al-Aqsa hospital I personally did not see a single one.’
He said he met many patients who had clearly been beaten in detention camps, and one patient who had been dragged along the ground by the external fixator holding his broken limb together.
He said that on his second visit he treated a disabled man who ‘in detention had been blindfolded and handcuffed to his wheelchair with his wrists tied to the right of his torso for 30 days.’
Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, a barrister acting for GLAN, who has compiled and submitted the evidence, said her only limiting factor in compiling the witness statements was the sheer number of cases of mistreatment and abuse.
Separately, Colombia’s government announced yesterday that it has banned coal exports to Israel, with a decree signed by the country’s president and several ministers coming into effect within five days.
‘Colombian coal is used to make bombs to kill Palestinian children,’ President Gustavo Petro said on X.
Colombia, which exports five per cent of its total coal production to Israel, also suspended diplomatic relations with the country in May.
Meanwhile, the Algerian government has announced that it is ready to set up field hospitals in Gaza.
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said yesterday that the country’s soldiers are ready to establish three field hospitals in the Gaza Strip within a few weeks if the Israeli-occupied Rafah border crossing with Egypt is reopened.
Algeria is prepared to send ‘hundreds of doctors’ to Gaza as well and work to ‘help rebuild what the occupation destroyed’, President Tebboune said during a rally in the city of Constantine.
The 78-year-old, who is running for re-election, pledged: ‘We will never abandon Palestine, especially Gaza’.
This comes a day after the North African country said it will send fuel to Lebanon amid a nationwide blackout caused by fuel shortages amid rising concerns of a looming war with Israel.
Hamas has called on all countries to ‘criminalise the racist and criminal practices and violations’ committed by Israel against humanitarian aid teams supporting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
‘Our people have been subjected to the most heinous genocide in modern history for 10 months, which will remain a stain of shame on all those who have failed to stop it, end it, and prosecute its perpetrators in international courts,’ the group said in a statement to mark World Humanitarian Day.
Hamas said Arab, Islamic and international aid organisations must ‘intensify’ their efforts to help Palestinians, especially in the besieged enclave.
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