Israel Criticized for the Iranian Bombing of an Israeli Hospital

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 19, 2025

 

And speaking of moral relativism . . .

 

On Thursday, when an Iranian ballistic missile crashed into the Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel, causing “extensive damage” and injuring at least 40 people, the world was forced to witness one of the more egregious examples of a phenomenon that has been on display since Hamas terrorists cascaded into Israel in the fall of 2023.

 

Within minutes of the attack, a cadre of sophisticates rushed to demonstrate their lack of elementary discretion and compared the Iranian strike to Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.

 

“People in Israel have never stopped justifying the shelling of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, but the second they fire on a hospital here, suddenly everyone comes out against the violation of the laws of war,” the Israeli psychologist Yoav Groweiss spouted in a lament publicized by the Turkish Bureau Chief for Middle East Eye.

 

“Bombing hospitals is a war crime,” the documentarian Sara Afshar declared. “Unfortunately, in the last decade or so, it seems to have become normalized from Syria to Ukraine to Gaza and now to Israel due to the inaction of the international community in upholding international law.”

 

“Israeli hospitals should be protected. Palestinian hospitals should be protected. Iranian hospitals should be protected,” asserted Fox News Channel war correspondent Trey Yingst. “This isn’t hard.”

 

Well, nothing is “hard” to understand if it is oversimplified to the point that otherwise glaring ethical, tactical, and situational distinctions are blurred. Those who are keen on insisting that there is no difference between Moscow’s many wanton attacks on hospitals and maternity wards in Ukraine and Syria, Iran’s virtually indiscriminate bombardment of Israeli population centers, and Israel’s discriminating strikes on Iranian military personnel, nuclear facilities, and command and control sites will have a tough enough time justifying their moral inversion. Equating Iran’s attack on Soroka and Israel’s actions against Hamas in the Gaza Strip is simply depraved.

 

But then, this was the instinct on display when the Israel Defense Forces approached — not besieged, not attacked, but approached — the Gaza Strip’s Al-Shifa Hospital complex. Israel had provided ample evidence that Hamas fighters had long used the complex as a base of operations, much of which was ignored by the international community in the rush to allege that the Israelis simply wanted to kill and displace the infirm.

 

When the Israelis accessed that complex, they produced even more independently verifiable evidence of the extent to which Hamas terrorists used the facility as a weapons depot and command center — a condition that strips the facility of immunity from attack according to the Laws of Armed Conflict. The United States subsequently confirmed that Hamas and other militant groups in the Strip used the hospital “to command forces and hold some hostages.” So, too, did skeptical Western news outlets.

 

Shifa is hardly the only medical facility the IDF was compelled to strike and clear out. International media outlets were shown footage of guns, ammunition, explosives, and evidence of the abuse of female hostages when they cleared out the “armory” beneath Al-Rantisi children’s hospital. The head of the nursing department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, who bravely spoke out against Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s use of that facility for military operations, disappeared shortly after he issued that admonition. The IDF released footage of a Hamas operative confessing to using northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital as a shelter. And so on.

 

“Hamas’s use of hospitals as part of its fundamental human shield strategy has been thoroughly documented and substantiated,” an April Henry Jackson Society report read. Indeed, the misuse of civilian medical centers for military purposes has been acknowledged, which makes sense given the extent to which Hamas wasn’t even hiding its tactics from the public:

 

A 2006 PBS documentary titled “Gaza E.R.” explained and confirmed with footage that “armed militants inside Shifa are one of the hospital’s biggest problems.” During the civil war between Hamas and Fatah for control of the Strip in 2007, Human Rights Watch documented gun battles between the two groups in and around two hospitals. The report said, “Fatah gunmen began firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, drawing Hamas fire from inside the building, killing one Hamas and one Fatah fighter.” A 2008 article in The New York Times documented how “armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls” of Shifa Hospital. The article also described how Hamas operatives killed five accused collaborators in the hospital. In a 2024 report, the newspaper also recounted how in the 2014 Gaza conflict, Hamas routinely held news conferences at the hospital and used it as a meeting place for Hamas officials to speak with journalists. A 2014 report in The Washington Post stated that the hospital “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” A 2015 report from Amnesty International described how Hamas used Shifa Hospital as a location to interrogate and torture suspected collaborators.

 

Even the New York Times, which felt compelled by some force to describe it as a “debate over whether Hamas is using medical facilities as cover,” had the good sense to settle the debate in that very report.

 

You will wait in vain for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to provide independent evidence that the Soroka facility was a legitimate military target — not just because no such evidence exists, but because no one is even asking for it. It’s almost as though Israel is held to a standard that is not applied to the terrorists that torment it or the rogue regimes that sponsor attacks on Israelis. Wish we had a word for that sort of thing.