By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
What would you like Israel to do about the Hamas
operations under the Al-Shifa hospital complex and other hospitals in the Gaza
Strip?
A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would
likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that
the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal
to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza
Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you
declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and
its equipment to that spot.
The decision before Israel is to either attack the Hamas
targets underneath hospitals while attempting to avoid civilian casualties, or
to leave the Hamas operations intact. Attack, and you run the risk of higher
Palestinian civilian casualties, even greater outrage on the world stage, and
even more propaganda victories for Hamas, painting the Israelis as cruel
monsters. Hold back, and Hamas gets to keep more of its men and arms safely in
place to fight another day and plot more massacres.
For those who wonder if Hamas really does operate
underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, here’s an account from Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner of the New
York Times, back in 2008:
At Shifa Hospital on Monday, armed
Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls. Asked their function, they
said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under
way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic
section, a woman in her late twenties asked a militant to let her see Saleh
Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital.
Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending
to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was
shot in the left side of the head. A bit of brain emerged on the other side of
his skull.
Hajoj, like five others who were
killed at the hospital in this way in the previous 24 hours, was accused of
collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by
Hamas judges, and when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others
were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
Another account from El-Khodary in 2009 described a young
Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter demanding he be treated first, ahead of
civilians, even if their injuries were more severe:
A car arrived with more patients.
One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick
treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a
big smile.
“Hurry, I must get back so I can
keep fighting,” he told the doctors.
He was told that there were more
serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are
fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so
fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.
“Why are you so happy?” this
reporter asked. “Look around you.”
A girl who looked about 18
screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked
in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly.
A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
“Don’t you see that these people
are hurting?” the militant was asked.
“But I am from the people, too,”
he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They
should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
Like everything else in the Gaza Strip, it appears that
the hospital’s operations were intertwined with Hamas — a deliberate strategic
choice to make the line between military operations and innocent civilians as
blurry as possible.
Here is the account from CNN’s Nic Robertson, embedded with the IDF as
it investigated another hospital in the northern part of Gaza city, the
Al-Rantisi children’s hospital:
The Israeli military’s focus on
hospitals in Gaza is growing more intense with a spokesperson inviting news
media to visit a medical center for children on Monday, where he alleged parts
of the basement had been a Hamas “command and control center” and may have been
used to hold hostages.
A CNN team embedded with the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and was shown guns and explosives in one room
located beneath Al-Rantisi children’s hospital on Monday, which IDF
spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari termed as an “armory.”
He also pointed to a chair with a
rope next to it and a piece of women’s clothing, which he said would be tested
for DNA, and a makeshift toilet.
The implication is that this is one of the spots where
Israeli and/or international hostages were being held. Separately,
the IDF tweeted, “Beneath the Rantisi Hospital in Gaza, IDF forces found a
room where Israeli hostages are believed to have been held. The calendar found
in the room marked the days since October 7 Massacre with the title “Operation
Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’ name for their horrific attack on Israel.”
If you want the IDF version of the footage, you can find
it here; Hagari points to the captured explosives, vests with
explosives for suicide attacks, hand grenades, Kalashnikov-style rifles, and
rocket-propelled grenades.
“People shooting RPGs from hospitals! This is Hamas!
Firing RPGs from hospitals! The world has to understand who Israel is
fighting against!” Hagari fumes.
Hamas still holds about 240 hostages, including nine Americans. While the exact number is not
known, it is believed to have grown by one, because one hostage, a woman who
was nine months pregnant, is believed to have given birth in captivity. In the
footage with Hagari, there is a baby bottle near the chair in the basement.
Back to CNN’s report:
CNN was shown a shaft, about 200
meters away from Al-Rantisi, which Hagari claimed was located next to a Hamas
commander’s house and also a school.
Wires leading into the shaft
provided power to the tunnel from solar panels fixed onto the roof of the Hamas
commander’s house, he also said.
“We [put] a robot inside the
tunnel and the robot saw a massive door, a door that is in the direction of the
hospital,” Hagari said.
In Robertson’s
report, he kneels by the four rather old-looking, likely Kalashnikov-style
rifles lined up on the floor and notes, “These guns alone have potentially huge
implications for Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s apparent push to take control of
them. The International Committee for the Red Cross say that hospitals are
given special protection under international humanitarian law during a time of
war. But if militants store weapons there, or use them as a base of fire, then
that protection falls away.”
Hagari and the IDF forces also showcased a motorcycle
found in the basement, with a bullet hole in it, contending it is one of the
motorcycles used in the October 7 massacre.
By the way, I know it’s de rigueur to bash CNN in
conservative circles, but let’s acknowledge that Robertson is sticking his neck
out by reporting from an active war zone, with the IDF and Hamas fighting just
down the street, letting us see the war-torn landscape and inside the hospital.
Robertson agreed to IDF rules to not show the faces of Israeli soldiers or any
sensitive military equipment. CNN says the IDF did not have any editorial
control over what Robertson and his camera crew reported. Much like Clarissa Ward’s excellent reporting from the ground in
Afghanistan and Ukraine, this is what CNN does best. CNN deserves a lot of
the criticism it gets, but when there’s a foreign crisis going on somewhere
else in the world, CNN brings out its A-game.
Have you ever tried to do something mildly dangerous —
standing on a high ladder, putting up the Christmas lights on your roof, or
something like that — and your spouse tells you, “Be careful”? As if you were
not being careful already, and needed to be reminded of the risks that you’re
extremely aware of, because you’re the one actually up there and trying not to
fall?
That’s more or less President Biden’s message to Israel right now:
Q: The hospitals in Gaza — have
you expressed any specific concerns to Israel on that, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know I
have not been reluctant in expressing my concerns what’s going on. And it is my
hope and expectation that there will be less intrusive action relative to the
hospital. We’re in contact, and we’re — with — with the Israelis.
Also, there is an effort to take
this pause to deal the release of prisoners, and that’s being negotiated as
well with — the Qataris are engaged and – So, I remain somewhat hopeful. But
the hospital must be protected.
Hey, that’s a hospital, fellas! Be less intrusive and
more careful! Gee, thanks, Mr. President. What would we ever do
without you?
By contrast, let’s note the unusual moral clarity from U.S. State Department spokesman Matt
Miller yesterday, observing that if Hamas did not make the deliberate
choice to hide under hospitals, no one would be in this grim situation:
Number one, you heard Jake
Sullivan on TV yesterday say that we don’t want to see hospitals be the subject
of crossfire. We want to see the civilians who are sheltering in hospitals, the
civilians who are being treated in hospitals, including babies in hospitals, be
protected. Civilians are — hospitals are legitimate civilian infrastructure;
they should be protected. At the same time, I would say Hamas continues to use
hospitals as locations for its command posts. So this is — we talk about
difficult issues; this is a very difficult issue.
We don’t want to see civilians
caught in the crossfire. We would love to see Hamas vacate the hospitals that
it’s using command posts immediately. We would love to see all the people that
are calling for Israel to take steps to protect hospitals call for Hamas to
vacate the hospitals, and stop using civilians as human shields. We would love
to see Hamas take some of the fuel reserves it’s sitting on and use that to
supply hospitals in northern Gaza. We would love to see Hamas have taken the
fuel that Israel offered it yesterday — that they declined — for use at al‑Shifa
Hospital. So, it’s a very difficult situation. And I would say, as a principle
––I’ll just restate what I said at the top — we do not want to see civilians
caught in the crossfire.
Here are Sullivan’s comments on Face the Nation that Miller
referred to:
JAKE SULLIVAN: Well, Margaret,
without getting into intelligence information, we can just look at the
open-source reporting that Hamas is using hospitals, as it uses many other
civilian facilities, for command and control, for weapons storage, to house its
fighters. And this is a violation of the laws of war.
That being said, Margaret, the
United States does not want to see firefights in hospitals, where innocent
people, patients receiving medical care are caught in the crossfire. And we’ve
had active consultations with the Israeli Defense Forces on this.
Does Sullivan think the IDF wants to
have a firefight in a hospital?
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