Zionist extremists — later subsumed in the IDF — tried to murder the founder of Britain’s NHS, the man who gave healthcare to millions, including Jewish refugees, to force imperial policy toward their settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is the very same eliminationalist creed driving today’s campaign to cripple Gaza’s ability to care for its own people.
Clement Attlee, Britain’s Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, is remembered as the steady hand that guided a war-weary nation into peace and prosperity. A veteran of World War I and Winston Churchill’s deputy in World War II, Attlee led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in 1945.
Despite inheriting an effectively bankrupt country from the war, Attlee’s government moved boldly to build a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Under his leadership, Britain created the National Health Service (NHS) – providing free healthcare to all citizens – and implemented sweeping social reforms, from social security to the nationalisation of major industries. These reforms cared for veterans and war-ravaged families alike, laying the foundation for modern Britain’s social welfare system.
His government also presided over decolonisation in South Asia and the end of the Mandate in Palestine. More than one survey of scholars has ranked Attlee as the most successful British Prime Minister of all time. The NHS he helped found in 1948 remains a beloved national institution and a symbol of public welfare that Britons hold dear to this day.[1]
The Stern Gang’s Letter Bomb to Attlee
In 1947, the terrorist Zionist underground group Lehi, derisively nicknamed the ‘Stern Gang’ by the British launched a letter-bombing campaign in the UK. Their motive was to terrorise British authorities into ending the Mandate of Palestine on Zionist terms.
High-profile British figures, such as Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, received parcel bombs in the mail. Had these exploded, Attlee – the very Prime Minister who championed the NHS and the welfare of millions could have been assassinated by Zionist terrorists on British soil.
Slightly shifting the colonial policies of Britain in Palestine, Attlee’s government, particularly Ernest Bevin at the Foreign Office, had imposed limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine and resisted unbridled Zionist expansion.[2]
This stance infuriated Zionists, bent on cleansing Palestine regardless of the target, even if it was the very state that had propped them into existence. Lehi and its better-known counterpart Irgun embarked on a campaign of bombings and assassinations against British targets in the 1940s.
The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (the British administrative HQ) in 1946, killing 91 people. Lehi, for its part, assassinated Britain’s minister in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in 1944, and then set its sights on British leaders like Attlee in 1947.
Terrorists Turned Statesmen
Members of the Lehi later became part of Israel’s mainstream. After Israel’s founding in 1948, the new state absorbed the various Zionist militias into the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Fighters from Irgun and Lehi were incorporated into the army, and some went on to prominent roles. Notably, Lehi’s leaders included Yitzhak Shamir, listed on British wanted posters under his alias Yizernitzky. Shamir later served as Prime Minister of Israel.
Menachem Begin (an Irgun commander turned Israeli Prime Minister) once quipped that for the Zionist underground, there was no distinction between military and civilian targets if it furthered their cause. The attempted assassination of Attlee thus foreshadowed the broader pattern of today’s medicide in Gaza, a term coined by UN experts to denounce the systematic targeting of its healthcare.[3]
Gaza’s Health System in the Crosshairs
The same ruthless contempt Lehi showed in the 1940s for Clement Attlee now lives on in the IDF’s calculated medicide of Gaza’s doctors, patients, and entire healthcare system.
On 17 October 2023, a massive bomb rocked the courtyard of the Anglican-run Al-Ahli Hospital (‘Baptist Hospital’), which was packed with patients and families sheltering from the raids. The bomb killed some 500 people, including many children and displaced civilians.[4]
In mid-November 2023, Zionist forces besieged Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the territory’s largest medical complex with over 1,500 patients and staff, plus thousands of displaced taking refuge. The hospital was cut off from electricity and water. By the end of the assault, observers described the complex as a ruin. Hospital buildings were bombed, and the facility’s departments were systematically and “completely destroyed and burned”, leaving the once-bustling medical complex “gone forever”.[5] Footage in March 2024 showed the burned-out husk of Al-Shifa, its wards reduced to ashes.
Nasser Hospital was stormed by Israeli troops on 15 Feb 2024. The IDF raid forced the evacuation and closure of Nasser, which by March had completely ceased function.[6] This assault knocked out the last fully-operational hospital in southern Gaza at that time, leaving thousands of civilians with nowhere to go for treatment.
On 20 Nov 2023, an attack on the Indonesian Hospital killed at least 12 people, including patients and caregivers, and injured dozens.[7] The World Health Organization noted that the Indonesian Hospital had already been hit five times since the genocide began in October. Relentless bombardment left the Indonesian Hospital and others in Gaza’s north out of service, crippling medical care for tens of thousands.
Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last major hospital in northern Gaza, was raided and put out of service in December 2024 after repeated attacks had already wrecked its ability to function.[8] By that point, health officials described a “systematic dismantling of the health system” in Gaza, with even makeshift clinics under fire. By May 2025 the WHO had documented 686 attacks on healthcare in Gaza since October 2023, affecting 122 facilities and killing scores of medical staff.
Gaza’s Health Ministry – essentially its NHS – was decimated, operating from the rubble to tally the dead and care for the wounded with whatever scant resources remained.
Britain’s Legacy and Palestine
British Prime Minister who built the NHS was nearly murdered by Zionist terrorists who today form the IDF. Now, decades later, that same fascist ideology, emboldened and supported by the British state military is literally burning down and bombing hospitals in Gaza.
The hypocrisy is galling. In recent months, British doctors, from junior medics to seasoned consultants, have been disciplined, suspended, or sacked from NHS posts, jeopardising their careers for defending the very principles upon which the NHS was built, while Britain’s government shields the perpetrators of Gaza’s medicide.
Britons, who benefit daily from the social welfare Attlee built, should harbour endless outrage that those who once tried to kill him are not only killing doctors and patients in Gaza at the behest of the British state, but forcing others out of their posts at home.
That outrage must drive not only token recognition of a shattered Palestinian state, but active support for armed resistance against the destruction of its healthcare. Rather than criminalise its resistance, it must compel the world to acknowledge and defend the Palestinian right to resist Zionism by every means necessary.
References:
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/clement-attlee
[2] https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/british-and-irish-history-biographies/ernest-bevin
[3] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/08/un-experts-appalled-relentless-israeli-attacks-gazas-healthcare-system
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/17/photos-an-israeli-air-raid-on-al-ahli-arab-hospital-kills-an-estimated-500
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/4/2/israels-war-on-gaza-live-five-aid-workers-killed-after-delivering-food?update=2813019
[6] https://news.sky.com/video/gaza-inside-nasser-hospital-after-reported-israeli-attack-13377716
[7] https://www.emro.who.int/media/news/who-appalled-by-latest-attack-on-indonesian-hospital-in-gaza.html
[8] https://www.who.int/news/item/28-12-2024-kamal-adwan-hospital-out-of-service-following-a-raid-today-and-repeated-attacks-since-october
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