The Second Battle for Shifa Hospital Shows Israel Will Accept Only Victory

By Noah Rothman

Monday, April 01, 2024

 

Those who camouflage their hostility toward Israel’s objectives in its defensive war against Hamas as little more than antipathy toward Benjamin Netanyahu must be frustrated today. The dubious claim that Israel is conducting a cruel war devoid of respect for human life is being rebutted today by one of the Israeli prime minister’s foremost domestic opponents.

 

In a Monday morning statement, former Israeli prime minister and current center-right opposition figure Naftali Bennett called the two-week operation to once again clear terrorist elements from Gaza’s Shifa Hospital an “amazing battlefield achievement.” Indeed, with roughly 200 Hamas fighters killed, another 500 captured, and 6,000 civilians evacuated without a single noncombatant fatality, the outcome was “unprecedented in urban warfare,” as Bennett put it. “These results undermine the false claim that the IDF is targeting civilians,” he said. “If we didn’t care about innocent lives, we’d have simply bombed the whole complex, without risking [the] lives of our own fighters.”

 

The war Hamas inaugurated on October 7, 2023, has now seen two battles to liberate Gaza’s largest hospital network from terrorist control. The first began late last year and concluded with an impressive IDF operation that cleared out the hospital while preserving the ongoing medical services Shifa provided Gaza’s civilians. The second wrapped up on Monday morning following a two-week operation in which only two IDF soldiers were killed, culminating in the seizure of a trove of weaponry and intelligence as well as the neutralization of the hospital as a terrorist command-and-control node.

 

Western media outlets don’t paint quite the rosy portrait of this operation that Bennett did. Israel’s pacification of the Shifa complex left “a wasteland of destroyed buildings and Palestinian bodies scattered in the dirt,” Reuters’ report began. That could be said of any military operation, the purpose of which is to defeat an armed opposition and deprive it of defensive infrastructure.

 

Hamas-run institutions told Reuters that there was no armed presence in the hospital, a claim lent at least some undue credibility by the New York Times. “The Israeli troops left destruction in and around the hospital complex after a two-week battle with what it said were Palestinian militants,” the Times report’s summary read. Who else would the IDF have engaged in combat for two weeks but “militants?”

 

The credibility of Israel’s side of the story is further bolstered by the granular detail brought to bear by an IDF spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari. He discussed the degree to which the Israeli military targeted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in the hospital, the planning and execution of the raid, the circumstances that led the IDF to target infrastructure to break terrorist resistance (destruction wrought both by Israeli ordnance and Hamas mortar fire), and its efforts to withdraw civilians from the line of fire. That level of disclosure has not been matched by Hamas spokespeople. They maintain that the facility was entirely civilian in nature, and allege that the IDF summarily executed those Palestinians whom it did not torture.

 

The desire in Western media to erect elaborate moral equivalences between Hamas and PIJ on the one hand and the Israelis on the other is further complicated by the very fact of the second battle for Shifa Hospital. How did terrorist elements reoccupy the facility in the first place after they were ejected by the IDF in early January? It all happened out in the open.

 

As early as the first week of February, with the IDF turning its attention toward Hamas’s remaining redoubts in the south of the Gaza Strip, Hamas militants began reconstituting their base at Shifa. A typically credulous PBS dispatch from the time said the return of armed elements to Gaza City, “including near Shifa Hospital,” was part of Hamas’s efforts to “reinstate order,” prevent looting, and distribute salaries to Hamas-associated public servants. But why would so many terrorist operatives — “mostly men in their 20s to 50s,” many of whom were “involved in terrorism going back many years, including plots in the West Bank linked to the 2014 war as well as the October 7 attacks” as the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman observed — return to Shifa in the first place given the IDF’s interest in neutralizing it? It was an earnest mistake any terrorist could have made.

 

Hamas had every reason to assume “the IDF was facing pressure after having raided Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis,” Frantzman said. Therefore, “Hamas figured Israel wouldn’t go back to Shifa.” And with so much pressure on Israel to consent to a cease-fire, at the very least, “they would get a warning if the IDF was returning to Shifa.” Back in November of last year, Hamas and PIJ terrorists had ample opportunity to evacuate their fighters, including some the IDF maintains were militants involved in the planning and execution of the 10/7 massacre. After all, the prolonged siege of the hospital and the humanitarian effort to maintain its medical operations were telegraphed well in advance. By contrast, the IDF’s second raid on the hospital came as a “surprise,” according to Hagari, in which “deception tactics” persuaded terrorist elements that they were as secure in the hospital as they had always been.

 

This IDF operation exposes once again the disregard Hamas and PIJ have for civilian infrastructure in Gaza, as if more evidence were necessary. It demonstrates beyond a doubt that the hospital serves as an irreplaceable terrorist base — a claim that many Western media outlets dismissed even despite the IDF’s presentation of the evidence in support of that obvious and undeniable reality. And Israel’s return to the hospital to finish a job its commitment to abiding by the laws of armed conflict left unfinished is proof that Jerusalem will prosecute this war to a definitive conclusion. That fact is likely to produce manic episodes among Israel’s Western critics, but it’s valuable if communicating clearly that Hamas will not survive this war helps break the group’s will to resist.

 

The reconstitution of Shifa as a terrorist site also showcases the extent to which terrorist elements in the Gaza Strip rely on the West to save them from Israel’s wrath. They take solace in the naïve westerners who march through American and European cities demanding unilateral Israeli surrender. They depend on Western NGOs and governments to rein Israel in, shielding terrorist safe havens from Jerusalem. But this is not just another “round” of fighting. And the Biden White House knows it.

 

“Israel cleared Shifa once,” national-security adviser Jake Sullivan observed in mid March. “Hamas came back into Shifa, which raises questions about how to ensure a sustainable campaign against Hamas so that it cannot regenerate, cannot retake territory.” Sullivan need not worry. This is what a “sustainable campaign” to eliminate Hamas looks like.