By Noah Rothman
Friday, November 03, 2023
Depending on the media outlet, the Israeli Defense Forces
today executed either a strike inside Gaza that landed “near” a convoy of ambulances or one that “hit” the medical convoy directly. Discerning consumers of
news media are probably capable of detecting the editorial sympathies the
discrepancy exposes. Nevertheless, the episode is a sign of things to come as
IDF forces approach ever closer to Al-Shifa Hospital.
The medical institution has been converted into a
dual-use facility by Hamas terrorists. It houses both legitimate civilian
infrastructure and legitimate military targets, and it is a devilishly
frustrating objective for Israeli forces that they cannot bypass. Recently,
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari provided reporters with a set of
materials outlining the extensive tunneling system underneath the 1,500-bed
hospital that Hamas allegedly uses to plan and execute its attacks. Via
the Wall Street Journal:
[Hagari] said the underground bases
at Shifa are used as command and control centers, which help Hamas coordinate
its militant activities, including the firing of rockets at Israel. He said the
intelligence Israel gathered about Hamas’s use of hospitals has been shared
with other intelligence agencies in the world so they could corroborate.
He also said that after thousands
of Gazans took part in a massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, many of them
immediately went to Shifa after fleeing Israel. “We have concrete evidence that
hundreds of terrorists flooded into Shifa hospital after the Oct. 7 massacre,”
said Hagari, but he didn’t provide details about how the military concluded
that.
Not only does the hospital’s underground infrastructure
serve as a Hamas base, but, according to the IDF, the terrorist group
reportedly utilizes the facility’s energy infrastructure to supply the tunnel
system with resources. And the thousands of patients and hospital staff parked
atop that military facility preclude the possibility that it can be neutralized
from the air.
By locating their military facilities in soft civilian
targets like Al-Shifa, Hamas has two objectives. First, force the IDF to
infiltrate the building to execute a dangerous and likely high-cost operation
designed to clear it out room by room. Hamas’s second goal is to propagandize
the operation by insisting Israel is executing a wanton attack on an
illegitimate target only to further the Jewish State’s bloody campaign of
“genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” To survey the Western press’s coverage of
Israel’s response to the 10/7 massacre, Hamas is all but certain to succeed in
its first objective — at least, among those who are receptive to Hamas’s
claims.
But those who do take Hamas’s claims at face value are
discounting both the evidence Israel has presented and the laws of war.
“Hospitals only lose their protection in certain circumstances — for example,
if a hospital is being used as a base from which to launch an attack, as a
weapons depot, or to hide healthy soldiers/fighters,” the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote of the
Geneva Conventions governing the rules of armed conflict.
“Before a party to a conflict can respond to such acts by
attacking,” the ICRC added, “it has to give a warning, with a time limit, and
the other party has to have ignored that warning.” Israel provided such notice
to all hospitals on Friday, October 13. But as Raja Abdulrahim’s report in
the New York Times last month notes, total
evacuation is all but impossible, according to Al-Shifa’s staff. “There is
nowhere in Gaza that can accept the number of patients in our intensive care
unit or neonatal intensive care unit or even the operating rooms,” said hospital
director Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima. “It’s absolutely impossible to evacuate the
hospital.”
That is, of course, the point of Hamas’s enterprise. It
does not seek, nor does it desire, the depopulation of this facility. Those
bodies are valuable to Hamas insofar as they might become collateral damage.
And the rest of the world is apt to play along with Hamas’s game. So, steel
yourselves for the forthcoming IDF assault on this facility. It may become the
scene of a bloody battle — one the global press will insist should not become a
target, all the evidence the IDF presented to the contrary notwithstanding.
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