Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza has led to the collapse of nearly every pillar of the territory’s healthcare system. The Israeli occupation forces bombed hospitals, killed medical personnel, obstructed humanitarian convoys, and decimated critical infrastructure. Major human rights organizations have documented that the destruction of healthcare in Gaza is systematic and deliberate; even so, they often stop short of naming what this truly represents: not an isolated wartime tactic but the culmination of a long-standing policy. Indeed, the erasure of Gaza’s health system began long before this latest episode of the genocide against the Palestinian people. It is the result of a sustained, calculated strategy aimed at rendering Palestinians unhealable, unhelpable, and ultimately perishable.
This policy brief introduces de-healthification as the governing logic of health under settler colonialism: the systematic degradation, obstruction, and weaponization of the very conditions that make health of the Indigenous population possible. In Palestine, Israeli de-healthification does not simply “attack healthcare;” it restructures health itself into a domain of domination, where illness and vulnerability are deliberately produced and administered. Within this colonial regime, unhealth becomes both a condition for rule and an instrument of control. De-healthification thus functions as the health-specific manifestation of the logic of elimination, through which the settler colonial state sustains itself by manufacturing illness, dependency, and the degradation of the conditions of life among the colonized Palestinian population.
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