Find Someone Who Loves You Like Israel Loves Attacking Palestinian Hospitals
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The World Health Organization has issued a statement saying that it has recorded 410 Israeli attacks on Gazan healthcare services since October 7, resulting in 685 fatalities, 902 injuries, and damage to 99 healthcare facilities.
As of this writing there is a still-ongoing IDF assault on Al-Shifa Hospital, which according to Israel has resulted in scores of Palestinian deaths and the capture of hundreds of prisoners. This is the fourth time Israel has attacked this particular hospital, which happens to be the largest hospital in Gaza.
Survivors of the assault have told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor that they repeatedly witnessed groups of prisoners being walked into the hospital morgue by IDF troops, then heard the sound of gunfire, then saw the IDF troops returning without the prisoners. Which is probably exactly what it would look and sound like if the IDF was conducting mass summary executions at Al-Shifa Hospital.
In an article for The Washington Post titled “How Biden became embroiled in a Gaza conflict with no end in sight” (the western press have an extensive track record of constantly framing US military aggressions as passive entanglements that the global superpower keeps innocently stumbling and bumbling its way into by accident), Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson report that according to their sources the Biden White House misrepresented the intelligence whose claims were used to justify the first Al-Shifa raid back in November.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, told The Washington Post that there was a marked discrepancy between what White House officials were saying publicly about Al-Shifa and what the intelligence they’d seen actually said:
“Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were ‘important and subtle differences’ between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. ‘I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,’ the senator said.”
In December, when it was all long over, The Washington Post published a report which found that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.” It was obvious that Israel was lying about Al-Shifa at the time back in November, with psyops like a nonexistent Hamas calendar being “discovered” in the hospital and a fake video purporting to show an Al-Shifa nurse saying the hospital was overrun with Hamas fighters being debunked as fast as they could be produced.
The evidence for the justification of this raid doesn’t appear to be any more robust, with the IDF publishing highly dubious footage of what it claims are “Hamas terrorist funds found inside Shifa Hospital”, complete with notes accompanying the money thanking Hamas by name for their “good work”.
Yeah okay sure, people have been somehow sending “Dear Hamas” letters to the militant group with wads of cash enclosed, and Hamas has been keeping both the cash and the letters in Al-Shifa Hospital, where they were kind enough to leave it for the incoming IDF raid to discover. Sounds legit. Definitely not the sort of thing Israel has been caught lying about many times before.
In an article titled “US and UK doctors in Washington to warn of IDF’s ‘appalling atrocities’ in Gaza”, The Guardian’s Chris McGreal writes the following:
Professor Nick Maynard, the former director for cancer services at Oxford University who worked at the al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza at the beginning of the year, accused the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of “appalling atrocities”.
“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system,” he said.
“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”
The UN says none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is fully functional. A dozen are partially working and the others are destroyed. On Monday, the Israeli military again raided the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Medical staff said the IDF killed and arrested Palestinians inside the hospital.
Israel’s constant fixation on attacking healthcare facilities makes no sense from a military strategic point of view, but it makes plenty of sense from a genocidal point of view. Hospitals are where people are brought to save their lives after they’ve been badly injured or have become acutely malnourished or sick, and they’re where civilians would normally take shelter when nowhere else is safe.
All the way back in December we were already seeing reports that Gaza’s healthcare system has been effectively destroyed by the nonstop attacks on healthcare facilities and the siege warfare cutting the enclave off from much-needed medical supplies. Now we are seeing Israel repeatedly re-attacking those same facilities, ensuring that they remain non-functioning despite all the most resilient efforts of the people of Gaza to stay alive.
This is exactly what it looks like. The narrative managers of Israel and the west will try to spin and distort the information you’re seeing right in front of your face to try and make you believe you’re seeing something other than what you’re seeing, but the truth really couldn’t be more self-evident. This is a genocide. If it wasn’t, Israel wouldn’t be methodically destroying hospitals while bombing and starving the population they’ve been oppressing for generations.
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