On 19 November, an organisation called “Future of Health” (FOH) is holding its yearly Leadership Symposium at the historical Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town, as part of a three-day summit aimed at “Shaping the Future of Health” through “Knowledge Sharing, Thought Provoking Discussions & Inspiring Sessions”.
Considering both the South African and global context, in which the vast majority of people do not have access to essential health care services, one might expect a global organisation that arranges itself under the banner of “the future of health” to direct its focus on addressing the crisis of unequal access to quality healthcare across the world. Unfortunately, this is far from the case.
FOH as an organisation was initiated in Israel in 2019 and is made up of various member institutions from the global for-profit healthcare sector, with the mission to “create a concrete vision that will influence and shape the future of health in the world.” Its founders and main supporters are the Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv and the Federation of American Hospitals. Consequently, as is reflected in the programme for the day, the symposium will be opened and closed by Israeli and American healthcare executives and features leading South African medical insurer Discovery Health’s CEO, Dr Ronald Whelan.
As Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its unlawful occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, willfully disregarding the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), it is astounding that an event with the participation of complicit Israeli healthcare institutions is allowed to take place in South Africa.
Israel has used the differential distribution of healthcare services and the systematic destruction of healthcare as a tool of oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians for decades. Some examples of this include:
- Despite Israel’s claims that its Palestinian citizens enjoy equal rights, the healthcare outcome for them is significantly worse than for Jewish citizens. As in South Africa, there are significant differences with respect to where services are located, means of transport, time and resources.
- In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel’s deliberate withholding of resources and restrictions on freedom of movement causes Palestinians to face lifelong disabilities and death from otherwise curable illnesses. Since 2023, Israel has also attacked, besieged, and denied entry to hospitals in the West Bank during frequent raids.
- Palestinians held captive in Israeli military prisons, including children, women, and men detained for months without charge, are routinely denied medical services for illnesses and injuries sustained from beatings and torture. This practice is a form of murder through intentional medical neglect. The tragic death of writer Walid Daqqah, the longest serving Palestinian political prisoner who was diagnosed with terminal illness in 2022, is a sore and shameful reminder of this.
- Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system over the past year, conduct which evidently amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity, by bombing and shelling hospitals, besieging and sniping medical personnel and patients, cutting off fuel and electricity, and denying the entry of medicines and equipment, including anaesthetics and painkillers. In addition, Israeli forces have occupied hospitals in Gaza to use as bases of operation.
- According to the UN, Israel has violated children’s right to life and basic healthcare in multiple ways. Facilities devoted to paediatric and neonatal care have been targeted consistently. Children in Gaza are not only denied medical care but are also subject to famine and dehydration. Deprived not only of any semblance of normality but also frequently of family, a new acronym has emerged in Gaza: WCNSF, that is, wounded child, no surviving family. Successive generations of Palestinians will be left in dire need of psychiatric care.
- In addition, “The deliberate destruction of health infrastructure providing sexual and reproductive healthcare, combined with the lack of access and availability to healthcare, is also a violation of women’s and girls’ reproductive rights and their right to life, health, human dignity and non-discrimination, as well as the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts.
- Israeli forces have abducted doctors and held them in torture camps such as Sde Teiman, where they have been subjected to torture, including beatings, sexual assault, and rape. Many have died in those camps or have not been seen again. Multiple witnesses have testified to the participation of Israeli doctors in the torture of Palestinian captives in these camps.
- A July report published by the Lancet Journal estimated that, in addition to the approximately thirty-seven thousand Palestinians confirmed killed by bombings and other physical attacks by June 2024, at least one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand more Palestinians had died as a result of starvation, disease, and lack of access to medical treatment. Scores more people have sustained life changing injuries and illnesses due to these attacks and the lack of access to treatment.
- Continuing the criminal pattern displayed in Gaza, in its attacks on Lebanon, Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted hospitals and healthcare workers. As of October 2024, almost 100 hospitals in Lebanon had been forced to shut down.
A conference in South Africa about the future of health which is led by a sector devoted to for-profit health insurance is an obvious violation of the clear imperative that we should all be heeding – to dismantle the gross inequalities in our own healthcare system. South Africa must not follow the lead of an apartheid regime – one structured to perpetuate the very inequalities that we are still struggling with today – and of institutions that are deeply complicit in the many grave crimes listed above.
According to the ICJ Advisory Opinion earlier this year, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and maintenance of an apartheid regime is illegal. The UNGA resolution demands that Israel end its unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories and specifically calls on states to adopt measures to ensure that “their nationals, and companies and entities under their jurisdiction… do not act in any way that would entail recognition or provide aid or assistance in maintaining” Israel’s unlawful occupation and to implement sanctions against individuals and institutions that are complicit in the maintenance of the regime. This conference is a clear violation of such an imperative.
Collaborations with institutions complicit in Israel’s crimes, in the form of organisations like FOH and conferences like this one, are precisely what international law seeks to restrict, therefore, we welcome the Department of Health’s decision to withdraw its participation. If Discovery Health is committed to a future of health based on the principles of justice and equality (as opposed to profit) and driven by care and concern for all human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, race or wealth, it should distance itself from FOH and its upcoming symposium.