WORLD NEWS – ITALY: Surgeons and health professionals based in Padua have launched a stark, urgent appeal published in The Lancet calling for immediate action to protect medical staff, patients and hospitals in Gaza. The letter, issued on an individual basis after scientific societies declined to endorse it, frames the devastation of the Palestinian health system as an acute humanitarian crisis. It warns that the destruction of hospital infrastructure has catastrophic effects on routine and lifesaving services, including cancer care and organ transplantation.
The appeal is driven by prominent signatories including Professor Alessandro Vitale and Professor Umberto Cillo, director of the Liver Transplant Center in Padua, alongside both Palestinian and Israeli surgeons. Their message is deliberately nonpolitical: they demand protection for the wounded and the caregivers who treat them. The letter will appear in print on October 4 and is intended to galvanize professional societies to break their silence and press for measures that preserve clinical capacity.
The medical signatories provide harrowing data: more than 1,500 doctors and health workers killed and an estimated 94 percent of hospitals damaged or rendered inoperable in the affected areas. Those losses ripple beyond immediate casualties. Patients with advanced tumors and those awaiting organ transplants face interrupted care and the near-impossible prospect of resuming complex transplantation programs while hospitals are unsafe or unusable. The letter emphasizes that interruption of transplant and other specialty services leads to preventable deaths and long-term collapse of health systems.
The appeal closes as a forceful call to conscience, asking scientific institutions to adopt a clear humanitarian stance and mobilize resources to safeguard medical neutrality. It portrays the signatories—surgeons, transplant specialists and frontline clinicians—with respect and urgency, insisting that protecting hospitals, staff and the fragile continuity of transplantation and other critical therapies is essential now and necessary to prevent such devastation in the future.
