On Monday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an editorial calling for the Israeli military to stop targeting hospitals in Gaza, titled “Leave Gaza’s Hospitals Alone.”
The editorial came out just a few days after the Israeli military destroyed the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beith Lahia, northern Gaza, and forced the hospital workers and patients to clear out, setting the facility on fire and killing at least five staff members in the process. The hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, has been arrested by Israeli troops and is believed to be at the notorious Sde Teiman torture prison.
The IDF claimed that it arrested 250 “terrorists” at Kamal Adwan, but the editorial points out the only “evidence” released to back up the assertion was a photo of two pistols and a knife.
“This meager haul does the opposite of supporting the IDF’s claims. For two pistols and a knife, you don’t evacuate dozens of patients and doctors from a hospital and march them in their underwear, on a cold night, before the cameras in order to humiliate them,” the editorial reads.
The editorial acknowledges that the real purpose of the destruction of hospitals in north Gaza is ethnic cleansing. Since early October, the IDF has placed Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia under a total siege and ordered all civilians to leave under the threat of death, whether by bombing, shooting, or starving to death. The IDF has also been demolishing every building in sight, so Palestinians have nowhere to return.
“It is fair to assume that the deliberate damage to hospitals in Gaza has a different purpose. It appears that as part of the ethnic cleansing of the northern Strip, during which the army destroyed almost all the area’s housing and infrastructure to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of those expelled from there, it was decided to destroy the hospitals as well,” the editorial says.
The editorial noted that the Fourth Geneva Convention affords a special status to hospitals during wartime. “The presence of small arms and ammunition in a hospital does not justify attacking it, nor does the presence of enemy fighters who are hospitalized there,” it reads.
Israel has targeted hospitals across Gaza since launching its genocidal war in October 2023. The US has continued to provide military aid and political support to Israel despite the campaign against medical infrastructure.
In October, 99 American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza wrote an open letter to President Biden and said they saw no evidence of militant activity. “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter reads.
