NEW YORK, February 22, 2024—Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without
Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), called today on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to demand an
immediate and sustained ceasefire in Gaza. Addressing the Council at its monthly meeting on Gaza, Lockyear also called
for the unequivocal protection of medical facilities, staff, and patients.
"Meeting after meeting, resolution after resolution, this body has failed to effectively address this conflict,”
Lockyear said. “We have watched members of this Council deliberate and delay while civilians die. This death,
destruction, and forced displacement are the result of military and political choices that blatantly disregard civilian
lives. These choices could have been—and still can be—made very differently.”
After more than four months of war, nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza amid Israel’s constant bombing
and attacks. Approximately 1.7 million people—nearly 75 percent of the population—are estimated to be forcibly displaced
and facing infected wounds and disease as they live in unsafe, unhealthy, and deplorable conditions. Providing health
care is becoming virtually impossible in Gaza as not even medical facilities are respected and safe from military
attacks.
“Our patients have catastrophic injuries, amputations, crushed limbs, and severe burns,” Lockyear said. “They need
sophisticated care. They need long and intensive rehabilitation. Medics cannot treat these injuries on a battlefield or
in the ashes of destroyed hospitals. Our surgeons are running out of basic gauze to stop their patients from bleeding
out. They use it once, squeeze out the blood, wash it, sterilize it, and reuse it for the next patient.”
On February 20, the same day the US vetoed a UNSC ceasefire resolution, an MSF staff member’s wife and daughter-in-law
were killed and six other people were injured when an Israeli tank fired on a clearly marked MSF staff shelter in
Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis. Last week, Israeli forces evacuated and raided Nasser Hospital, which is the largest medical
facility in southern Gaza. Those who were forced out have nowhere to go. They can’t move back to the largely destroyed
northern part of Gaza, and they aren’t safe in Rafah in the south, where Israeli forces have carried out airstrikes and
announced plans for an extensive ground offensive.
Since the war in Gaza began, MSF medical teams and patients have been forced to evacuate nine different health care
facilities in the Gaza Strip. In total, five MSF colleagues have been killed. Providing health care and scaling up
lifesaving assistance is nearly impossible because of the intensity of bombings and shelling, as well as intense
fighting.
“The consequences of casting international humanitarian law to the wind will reverberate well beyond Gaza,” Lockyear
said. “It will be an enduring burden on our collective conscience. This is not just political inaction—it has become
political complicity.”