On the Destruction and Humanitarianisation of the Health System in Gaza and the Need for a Biopolitical Bioethics

This paper examines Israel's destruction and 'humanitarianisation' of Palestinian health systems, arguing that this should be understood as an instance of 'necropolitics,' as conceived by Achille Mbembe. We review the extensive, long-term destruction of health systems in Palestine before 7 October 2023 and the catastrophic acceleration of that destruction in Gaza in the years since. We show that this process is central to Israel's project of limiting Palestinian life to what Mbembe calls a 'death world', a space where power is exercised through the systematic exposure of a population to death, and that it serves the security and economic agendas of Israel and its allies. By reducing Palestinians to death-like living conditions through the destruction and subsequent humanitarianisation of health infrastructure, Israel optimises its control over the remaining population of Gaza. We argue that necropolitics, and biopolitics more generally, are vital yet underused tools in bioethics, without which situations of extreme oppression cannot be adequately theorised.