…what do the laws of war say they can do? If they are being targeted from a hospital, they are allowed to eliminate that threat. They can even take over the hospital if that’s what it takes. They can secure it, then provide the medical resources, including members of staff, to keep the hospital running.
What they did instead was put them under siege, raided the hospitals, destroyed essential infrastructure, then abandoned them.
And it’s the abandoning part that makes your entire premise faulty. They didn’t prevent anyone from using Al Shifa as somewhere that could be used as a snipers nest in the future. They just stopped it from being used as a surgical hospital.
You do understand this, right? That thousands of people just reoccupied the hospital again? Except the only difference is that before the IDF raid it was a functional hospital, and now it is not.
Civilians, hospitals, essential infrastructure, they get protection in wartime whether you like it or not.
I’ll repeat it for you again: I never claimed they were unbiased. Every media outlet have bias. If you want to be critical of anything I’ve cited from AJ, then be specific.
I’ll rephrase. What is their agenda in regards to Israel and Gaza? And if we don’t trust the information coming out of UN humanitarian agencies, which information should we be trusting?
I’m not refusing to answer. It just appears you don’t like my answer.
Noted.
This didn’t start on 10/7. And none of that would have happened if Israel were complying with the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war.
This is a new claim. Cite please. For this particular war, not one that happened years ago.
Strawman.
I have never claimed that Hamas is “completely honoring the “laws of war”. This isn’t something I have claimed at all. I have argued the complete opposite. And this sentence: " Israel is indiscriminately bombing targets with no military value just for the sake of killing Arabs” bares no relation to anything I’ve said either.
Because Israel is killing hundreds of people every single day. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that over 10,000 infants and children have either been killed or are still buried under the rubble.
Because Israel is preventing food, water, medical supplies, fuel from getting through to the Palestinian civilian population, that is bringing Gaza to the brink of famine.
Because Israel have taken out of action over 20 hospitals, meaning that there is no healthcare available in the north.
Because Israel have driven 1.9 out of 2.3 million people out of their homes, destroyed many of the homes so that they can no longer return, and half of those who have been displaced are now in the border town of Rafah. And Rafah can’t cope.
Here the salient point: Israel and Hamas are allowed to fight. The actions by Hamas on 10/7 have been universally condemned. Israel’s right to defend themselves have been almost universally affirmed.
But there are things that the Geneva Conventions and the rules of law do not allow. One of those things are the hostages that Hamas are holding, and this has been condemned, and international agencies and governments are working to resolve this.
But other things are also not allowed. The siege is an example of collective punishment. Millions of Gazan’s are starving, in a few weeks there will be famine. I’ve documented other examples.
Why is there pressure on Israel? Because Israel has created a humanitarian catastrophe. The healthcare system has essentially been broken. People are living in tents where on average there is one toilet for every seven hundred people (these are weeks-old figures, with so many being forced into Rafah, I have no doubt these figures have gotten worse.) Isreal are telling people to evacuate neighbourhoods, then immediately bombing the place they told them to go. All of this I’ve documented in this thread. If you doubt anything I’ve said, I can provide citations, or you can just read my previous posts.
But things are about to get orders of magnitude worse. And people trapped in Gaza have got nowhere to go. Once famine sets in, and disease and infections take hold, along with the bombing and people still trapped under the rubble, we will see hundreds of thousands of deaths unless this stops soon, food, water and aid are allowed en masse, and the healthcare system is given a chance to recover. This is urgent. Which is why all of the pressure is on Isreal right now.
Again: I’ve documented what happened to different hospitals throughout this thread, often as it was happening.
For example, this is what happened at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in northern Gaza. The hospital was put under siege early in November. Then on November 10th the hospital was raided by the IDF, and patients and staff were expelled. There were five babies that were premature that required oxygen machines, and couldn’t be safely moved. Doctors that were forced to leave report that they explicitly told the IDF that there were babies remaining on the ward that needed attention.
When news reporters eventually returned to the hospital weeks later, the bodies of those babies were found decomposing where they were left.
At Al Shifa, the hospital was placed under siege for about two weeks before the IDF eventually moved in. Hospitals had been prioritised for the small trickle of aid that was getting in, but the siege meant fuel could no longer get through, power got cut, several patients, including premature babies died. An anonymous IDF spokesperson claimed that at some stage they took fire from the compound, but none of the doctors, nurses, patients, or the thousands of people that took shelter in the hospital witnessed this.
The IDF eventually took over the hospital. For three days, the IDF searched the hospital for “bases and weapons”, and provided not-enough-food-and-water for everyone there.
Then on day three, they issued an evacuation order…with only one hours notice. Patients and the thousands of people were forced to leave, even those who were not in any condition to travel. They had to walk to the nearest Hospital in the south.
This left a skeleton crew of medical staff, the director of the hospital, and those patients medically unable to move. Over the next few days, with the co-operation of the Red Cross/Crescent, they managed to transport the remaining patients, including numerous premature babies, to other hospitals. On one such trip, the convoy got stopped by the IDF, and the director of the hospital and some of the medical team were disappeared.
At the start of the pause in late November, the IDF abandoned the hospital. As people started to return, they found that, just like othe hospitals that had been taken over by the IDF, important infrastructure had been destroyed.
The IDF claimed that under Al Shifa was a bunker complex. Here is an official video of what they claimed existed:
Here is the Washington Posts investigation into their claims:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/21/al-shifa-hospital-gaza-hamas-israel/
A guest link was posted up thread if you want to scroll for it.
And that brings us to today. Al Shifa is now primarily being used as shelter for thousands of people now. The World Health Organization estimates that 50,000 people are using it as shelter at the moment. From Tedros:
These are just two of the hospitals. At least 20 hospitals have been taken out of action. I can walk you through, step by step, how many, if not all of them, were put under siege, raided, essential infrastructure destroyed, then abandoned. The process was remarkably the same for each one. Or you could do a search through this thread. Or you could look them up in google.
This is a problematic approach. Because it isn’t just Palestinian reports and claims. Its organizations like Doctors without Borders, who had insisted over and over again that the hospitals they were working at showed no signs of Hamas activity…and they were proven right over and over again. You’ve got numerous humanitarian and UN agencies all on the ground that were all saying the same thing. Why would you not give them significant weight? They aren’t the ones producing slick propaganda animations showing that command and control bunkers were hidden under hospitals.
Isreal have been brutal occupiers, and their regular use of humiliation, beatings and torture have been well documented by humanitarian agencies, and I’ve provided links to this all in this thread. And Isreal have a ruthlessly effiicent propaganda machine.
Rather than speculate, we can just look at what they did. I don’t really care why they did it. But under international humanitarian law hospitals are not allowed to be attacked. The exception is this:
The bar here, according to every reputable expert in international humanitarian law, is extremely high. “There was incidental fire from the compound” probably doesn’t reach it. And even if it did, then this would then apply:
You will note from what happened to the two hospitals I talked about here, that none of these contingency plans were put into effect. Far from " facilitate or implement measures for the rapid restoration of health-care services", instead they destroyed the ability for the restoration of health-care services. They literally took them out of action.
And the same happened to every other hospital they closed down. Then they abanonded them.
I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why they did this. But what it means is that hundreds of thousands of Gazans can no longer access healthcare. Not just to get treatment from the bombings. But maternity care. Cancer treatment. Dialysis. Covid. Heart attacks. All of the normal routine stuff you expect from a healthcare system as well as treating people that have just had bombs dropped on their house. There are no longer any functional hospitals in the north. And the nine remaining hospitals report attacks daily, both directly on the hospital and in the areas that immediately surround them.
