A coalition of Palestinian and international healthcare professionals, academics, and human rights advocates has launched the Gaza Health Solidarity Declaration – a landmark statement calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and for a reorientation of health engagement to centre Palestinian sovereignty, agency, and justice.

Gaza Health Solidarity Declaration

Palestinians living in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine have endured more than two years of unprecedented Israeli violence, amounting to genocide. Any form of meaningful action in its wake must understand this violence as an acceleration of the longstanding “slow-motion genocide,” the ongoing Nakba, and the established conditions of occupation and apartheid, which together are intrinsic to the structure and function of the settler colonial Israeli regime.

In light of the anticipated ceasefire, we reiterate our unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those who continue to resist Israel’s ongoing attempts at genocidal erasure.

In particular, we emphasize our solidarity with the Palestinian healthcare and first responder workforce, who continue to epitomize the height of integrity and humanity in their professional conduct under the most harrowing conditions.

Rebuilding and recovery must center Palestinian sovereignty and agency.

As we take stock of international governmental, non-governmental, and civil society engagement in Gaza both before and during this accelerated phase of Israel’s genocide, we recognize the urgent need to avoid repetition of the damaging failures of the past.

Notably, we identify long histories of complacency, complicity, and collusion by many international humanitarian and development actors and donors, the effects of which have functioned to prop up the occupation, undermine Palestinian political and social resistance, and weaken Palestinian agency and sovereignty.

Some of these practices include:

• Accepting funds from — and implementing programs on behalf of — bodies that have actively and passively supported Israel’s eliminatory violence against the Palestinian people: effectively “aid-washing” Israel’s genocide, occupation, and apartheid. These bodies include: governments that provide political, economic, and diplomatic support to Israel, and that shield its officials from legal accountability; governments and corporations that produce and transfer weapons and technologies to Israel; and organizations and foundations that are directly supported by these bodies.
• Partnering and coordinating with the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) despite some of these actors publicly acknowledging the active role played by the GHF in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the luring of Palestinians into death-traps at its distribution points.
• Limiting the effective and sustainable use of funds by providing restricted, project-based funding that aligns with the interests and priorities of funders, thus robbing Palestinian organizations of their agency and bypassing their intimate knowledge of their own context, needs, and priorities.
• Imposing restrictions on funding to Palestinian organizations, in particular pre-vetting service recipients and staff to exclude anyone perceived to have a connection to “sanctioned” organizations.
• Excluding Palestinian organizations and local leaders from strategic positions and decision-making roles, limiting their involvement to tokenistic consultation or service delivery, and targeting said individuals and organizations to undermine their work.
• Undermining the health sovereignty of the Palestinian people by setting up parallel systems of service delivery, which do not cooperate or coordinate with the existing Palestinian governmental and non-governmental service providers that are already well-rooted in their context and communities.

We align ourselves with the position shared by our Palestinian partners and comrades, which demands that internationalist engagement in Gaza should be motivated by solidarity, not charity.

To this end, we differentiate health solidarity on the basis of several essential dimensions:

• Palestinian agency is maintained, strengthened, and explicitly defended. Palestinians have long identified their own needs and are clearly able to build and maintain infrastructure to meet those needs, provided that they have the space and resources to do so.
• Individual and communal sovereignty claims are respected and strengthened. Palestinians must be able to control decision-making in health and all sectors.
• Political sovereignty is recognised as indivisible from health sovereignty. For Palestinians, political sovereignty entails: liberation from settler colonization, occupation, and incarceration; the end of supremacist and apartheid policies; the full realization of Palestinian rights, including the right of return, restitution, and reparations; and legal and effective self-determining authority.
• A critical analysis of the political determinants of health is foregrounded, which recognizes settler colonialism as the root cause of violence and poor health for all Palestinians.

These principles of health solidarity must be supported by the following approaches and actions in order to put an end to the genocide and support rebuilding and recovery in the wake of a ceasefire:

• Putting maximum weight behind efforts to isolate the Israeli colonial regime with economic sanctions, and a permanent severing of all diplomatic and political ties, so as to put an end to Israel’s erasure of the Palestinian people.
• Ending institutional and corporate complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people by withdrawing participation in the global economy that supports Israeli settler colonialism, including by instituting the economic, academic, professional, cultural, and diplomatic boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions against the Israeli colonial regime.
• Centering Palestinian organizations, which have long provided healthcare services to their communities, as the main implementation partners of health programs throughout Palestine. Palestinian organizations include the Palestinian Ministry of Health and Palestinian civil society organizations, whose vision and leadership must be supported.
• Promoting Palestinian leadership over foreign-led health programs by appointing Palestinians in leadership positions in the strategic planning, design, coordination, and monitoring and evaluation phases, not merely in junior roles during implementation.
• Providing flexible, long-term, programmatic funding and avoiding restricted, short-term, project-based funding.
• Providing technical and financial support to Palestinian institutions and communities in line with their defined priorities.
• Never imposing the pre-vetting of service recipients, staff, or partners based on political or other affiliations as a conditionality of funding.
• Refraining from establishing health systems and institutions that are parallel to, and undermine, Palestinian national institutions.

We reiterate that the right to Palestinian self-determination in its various manifestations is enshrined in international law and in all United Nations resolutions that concern the rights of the Palestinian people. At the same time, we refuse to limit our political imagination to the remit and application of international law, which has long failed to protect the people of Palestine.

With this health solidarity declaration, we state clearly our conviction that Palestinians can and will rebuild the health system in Gaza, while deepening a shared commitment to health equity and health justice throughout Palestine. We call on governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and the public to support these efforts in line with the principles and actions outlined in the Declaration.