butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
In conflict zones, PPE like this is meant to turn you into a walking white flag, especially if you are not authorized to carry a red cross on your uniform to identify you as Untouchable During Conflicts by the standards of an international court of law. PPE comes in a lot of formats, and when you work in a conflict zone as a medical professional of any kind, ostensibly your first job upon arriving to the scene is to confirm whether or not it is safe for you to go and DO your job. This is ~obviously~ a complicated and nuanced ask, and so it is commonly practiced to send medical personnel into conflict zones in high vis PPE that provides them both medical protection AND ballistic protection so that there are more situations in which they can justify running in to do their work despite the danger.
One of the things that has been so horrifying about the way the IOF operates in Gaza and the West Bank is that it negates the function of these forms of PPE. Medical professionals get captured, wounded, and killed REGARDLESS of how visibly identified they are, or even BECAUSE of it. This has led to a massive number of “hero” medics who simply run into frontline situations, no PPE gear, no thought for themselves or their colleagues, no perimeter checks or care for ANYTHING except how fast they can get in, grab their patient, and get out again, because this is now the ONLY effective way to perform medical duties in the region. To be a medical worker in Gaza or the West Bank is to accept death into your heart in ten thousand little ways just so you can save any lives you manage to while you manage to keep it up.
Think about that. Wanting to have a career saving lives means risking yours every day until one day you don’t make it out. It’s not heroic to live like that, it’s psychological torture, and it never needed to happen to these people. They could have just been doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. It didn’t have to be a game of Russian Roulette to see how many times you can evade sniper fire and bombing raids before your luck runs out. I need people to think about how many of the medical staff “heros” we’ve seen over the last five months who ended up dead within weeks or months of us learning their names, their faces. What it must be like to watch your colleagues drop dead around and keep going because the only other choice is a death you can’t stomach.
Press in blue. Medics in white. Obvious. Visible. Fighting for survival. If that isn’t enough for people to understand what’s happening, I don’t know what could be anymore.
