Gilbert says: “When we came back to the Erez border station, the Israeli soldiers told me that I could not go in to Gaza.”

Now the Israeli government is stating that Gilbert is banned for security reasons, according to an email from the Norwegian embassy in Tel Aviv.

The embassy took up the case on Gilbert’s behalf after he was refused entry last month.

Norway’s Secretary of State, Bård Glad Pedersen, said to VG:

 “From the Norwegian perspective, we have raised Gilbert’s exclusion from Gaza and asked Israel to change their decision. The humanitarian situation in Gaza is still difficult and there is a need for all health workers.”

Gilbert himself believes the decision is connected to his critical comments against the state of Israel.

The outspoken peace activist wrote a letter to the global media in July this year in which he spoke about the extreme conditions at the Gaza hospital where he worked.

Also,

Israel announced Wednesday it will refuse entry to United Nations human rights investigators who seek to probe potential war crimes committed in the latest 50-day military assault on Gaza.

The 47-member UN Human Rights Council in July approved the inquiry into “all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Gaza Strip in the context of military operations conducted since mid June,” focusing on the actions of Israel as well as Hamas.

Twenty-nine nations voted in favor of the investigation, with the U.S. issuing the sole “no” vote.

In a Wednesday evening statement reported by numerous media outlets, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon announced that Israel will not cooperate with the rights council’s commission, which is headed by international law professor William Schabas.

As a result, the investigators will not be allowed to enter Gaza through the Erez crossing, which is under Israel’s control. The Rafah crossing was recently closed off by the Egyptian government, meaning that entry is likely to be difficult for the UN team.

In his statement, Nahshon accused the rights council of “obsessive hostility toward Israel,” echoing Israel’s previous condemnation of the investigation as a “kangaroo court.”

Critics charge that the UN, in fact, does not go far enough, as U.S. veto power prevents the international community from acting on this and other inquiries, including the Goldstone Report, which reviewed a previous Israeli military attack on Gaza in 2009.

Nahshon’s statements are in keeping with Israel’s repeated dismissal of criticisms for the war on Gaza, which killed at least 2,194 Palestinians, at least 75% of them civilians and over 500 of them children.

Seventy-two Israelis, six of them civilians, also died in the conflict. Israel destroyed over half of Gaza’s hospitals and health centers and struck six UN schools sheltering Palestinians, including in cases where the UNRWA formally submitted coordinates of the shelters to the Israeli military. Israel has been accused of possible war crimes in the offensive by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. 

This is not the first time Israel has publicly criticized the rights council. Israel severed ties with the body in 2012, following the council’s launch of an investigation into Israeli settlements in the West Bank, considered illegal under international law.

“It’s business as usual for Israel to commit severe human rights violations and war crimes and refuse to be held accountable,” Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation told Common Dreams. “Now it’s time for the international community to take real action and sanction Israel.”

Note: The letter of Gilbert that antagonized Israel establishment

“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24hrs shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment at all in Shifa for the last 4 months).

They care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans.

HUMANS. Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world” (as Israel disseminate this propaganda).

“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless; my closeness to the Palestinian sumud [steadfastness] gives me strength, although in [some of the] glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace – but we cannot afford that: nor can they.

“Ashy grey faces – oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out. The cleaners [are] everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away… [only] to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.

More than 100 cases came to Shifa [in the] last 24 hrs, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here [there is] almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors – all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterdays hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormous[ly] resolute.

“And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!

And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again: salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ’Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches. So much made and paid in and by US.

“Mr. Obama – do you have a heart?

“I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.

“I am convinced, 100%, it would change history. Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.

“But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another Dahiya onslaught on Gaza. The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of death.

Please. Do what you can. …This cannot continue.”