Doctors Without Borders confirm Israel has killed yet another of its staff members

Yesterday, Israel killed a health worker at a bus stop in Gaza. Earlier in the week, it killed yet another journalist. You may have missed both of those stories because Israel has turned Gaza into “journalism’s graveyard“.

Israeli occupation forces have committed medelacide in Gaza since 2023, systematically decimating its healthcare system. As part of this process, they have murdered at least 1,400 healthcare workers and destroyed or damaged “at least 94% of all hospitals”. And now, Doctors Without Borders (also known as Médecins Sans Frontières or MSF) has confirmed that Israel has killed yet another of its staff members in Gaza, Omar Hayek. On the morning of 2 October, MSF said:

The attack took place on a street where our teams were waiting to take a bus to the MSF field hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza. All staff were wearing MSF vests, clearly identifying them as medical humanitarian workers.

Yet another Doctors Without Borders colleague murdered

Hayek became “the fourteenth MSF colleague” that Israel has murdered since October 2023. The humanitarian organisation said he was “an occupational therapist at an MSF clinic in Gaza City” and “a quiet man of profound kindness and utter professionalism”. He was also “the sole provider for his family”. Israel’s terror attack also seriously injured:

Multiple healthcare workers, MSF family members and MSF staff.

MSF added that:

Health workers in Gaza have been killed, threatened or detained, including Dr Mohamed Obeid, an MSF surgeon still in detention with no formal charges.

And it stressed that:

Nowhere in Gaza is safe. The entire population has been starved and besieged for almost two years. We call for an end to the bloodshed, an end to the genocide.

“Killing journalists is killing the truth”

Israel also took the life this week of journalist Yahya Barzaq. An airstrike on a cafe in Deir al-Balah in the centre of Gaza reportedly killed the freelance photographer. As TRT World reported:

In his final posts on Instagram, Barzaq said he had been forced to flee Gaza City to the south due to Israeli bombardment and threats of forced displacement.

People in Gaza knew Barzaq as a photographer of newborn babies. Before the genocide, he posted his professional portraits of babies on his Instagram page. During the genocide, he had “shared videos mourning children” that Israel had killed. The apartheid state has murdered at least 19,424 children so far, including about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-ten-year-olds. It has also been systematically starving the occupied territory’s babies.

As Al Jazeera pointed out, the apartheid state has killed many of the children Barzaq had photographed:

Israeli occupation forces have systematically assassinated journalists since 2023. The International Federation of Journalists says the figure stands at about 246 media workers. And this, it asserts, represents “over ten per cent” of Gaza’s journalists. As IFJ general secretary Anthony Bellanger wrote this week:

One hundred years after its creation, the IFJ faces the most terrible ordeal in its history. Gaza has become journalism’s graveyard. If we accept that reporters die there amid indifference, then we pave the way for other regimes to consider that the murder of journalists is a normal instrument of war.

He added that:

silence is a victory for the executioners. It allows them to say that nothing happened.

And he stressed:

Israel kills journalists. Killing journalists is killing the truth. And a world without truth is a world where executioners reign supreme.

Featured image via the Canary