Introduction
“Based on statements from Israeli officials, both from the right and the left, they have called for extermination, destruction, and displacement. More importantly, relying on the facts on the ground in the northern Gaza Strip, most of its land has been leveled. Hospitals have been militarized and targeted. The occupying army is working to transform large areas of Gaza into uninhabitable disaster zones. This is a practical translation of the statements of the Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Cabinet member Avi Dichter (former head of the Shin Bet), in which he stated that "Israel, by deporting the residents of Gaza, is working to bring about the catastrophe of 2023."[1]
The facts on the ground indicate that hospitals within the Gaza Strip do not enjoy any immunity, despite being guaranteed by international law. Their sanctity has been violated, and their occupants have been deliberately attacked one after another. The justification for these attacks is the claim that they are being used as military headquarters by the Hamas movement. These allegations are unsubstantiated and not supported by real evidence, and they have not been endorsed by international media outlets. The targeting of medical facilities in the Gaza Strip appears to be aimed at achieving other undisclosed Israeli goals. The Israeli incitement against Al-Shifa Hospital began years ago, and it was attacked over several days until the majority of patients, wounded individuals, and medical staff were evacuated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023. Subsequently, other hospitals, such as the Indonesian Hospital, Rantisi Hospital, and Al-Quds Hospital, were targeted. On the 45th day of the war on Gaza, the Palestinian Red Crescent clarified that only 9 hospitals out of 35 were operational in the Gaza Strip.[2]
As announced by the Ministry of Health affiliated with the Hamas movement on Monday, November 20, 2023, at least 12 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City. Meanwhile, 29 malnourished children, evacuated from Al-Shifa Hospital to Egypt through the Rafah crossing, arrived. The malnourished children were evacuated from Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in the Gaza Strip, after the Israeli army invaded the hospital, meticulously searched and destroyed some of its sections, according to doctors and officials present. The director of hospitals in the Gaza Strip confirmed on Sunday, November 19, 2023, to the "France Presse" agency the evacuation of 31 malnourished children from the hospital, with the reason for the arrival of only 29 of them in Egypt still unknown. The French news agency quoted the World Health Organization, which participated in evacuating the children from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to the Emirati hospital in Rafah in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, saying on Sunday, November 19, 2023, that there were "11 children in critical condition," all suffering from serious infections.[3]
The Declared Objective and Unstated Objectives
Indiscriminate Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip encompassed many civilian targets which included hospitals, while the Al-Shifa
Medical Complex was targeted from day one. What is the logic and the undisclosed objectives behind these actions?
On the official level, and as alleged by several politicians and military spokespersons, Israel has attempted to justify targeting a place swarming with the wounded, the sick and with refugees, who are denied medicines, medical supplies, and fuel, by alleging that armed Palestinian forces use its lower floors as shelters, command centers and arms depots. The Israelis have even claimed that the Al-Shifa complex houses the central military command of Islamic Resistance/HAMAS. As is the case with many other instances and developments in this ongoing war waged by Israel against Gaza since the Tufan al-Aqsa operation on October 7, 2023, there exist certain undeclared objectives behind this targeting aimed at turning the lives of Gaza’s sick and wounded into a hell and tied to the objectives of the war (declared and undeclared), most of which have not been achieved. This serves to explain the escalation in military operations despite the world-wide movements of protest. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, the number of the dead, on the thirty-second day of the war on Gaza has exceeded 11,000, and the wounded 21,000. To date, Israel has targeted 120 medical centers, knocking out of service 18 hospitals and 40 medical centers by direct shelling or through denying them fuel.[4]
According to the World Health Organization, the medical catastrophe inside Gaza is horrific. In addition to the lack of medical supplies and equipment, there are tens of thousands of people who sought shelter in hospitals or in their immediate environs seeking shelter from Israeli bombardment. In Gaza, there exist 120,000 individuals who need medical intervention to save their lives and today are in dire straits, in addition to 84,000 other disabled individuals living inside territories embraced by this war.[5]
Accusations and Declared Israeli Objectives
The Al-Shifa medical complex is the largest of 34 hospitals in Gaza. Israel has shown special interest in it and this explains why this hospital complex has been subjected, before and during the current war, to mounting pressure, culminating in shelling its precincts. This followed a wide campaign of vilification, alleging that it acts as a refuge for “terrorists”. Countering this campaign, HAMAS, health officials and the directors of Al-Shifa categorically deny that the HAMAS movement has hidden a military installation inside or beneath the hospital complex, and declared they would welcome an international inspection of the entire complex.
Israeli officials, military spokespersons and politicians have repeated this accusation many times in order to justify their demand to close down and empty the Al-Shifa complex and even to occupy it. Avichay Adraee, a military spokesperson using the Arabic language, has gone back to repeating that the shelling of its gate on the evening of November 10, 2023, was in response to an “abortive Palestinian rocket.”[6]
Noticeable in this regard is that Adraee came up with this story several hours after the shelling of the Al-Shifa gate and without offering any substantial proof, after that act had echoed around the world. This was exactly what had happened when the Baptist Hospital in Gaza was shelled directly on October 17, 2023. This escalation took place following a series of pressures and direct calls made by the chief spokesperson of the Israeli army, Admiral Daniel Hagari, and addressed to the hospitals in northern Gaza, both those inside them and in their immediate vicinity, urging them to leave and head southwards “for their own safety”. These repeated Israeli pressures preceded the land campaign which began on October 27, 2023, in an attempt to gain time and to begin immediately the total destruction of northern Gaza before the start of the land campaign.[7]
Burnt Earth Policies and Actions
Israeli pressure campaigns against Gazan hospitals preceded the land campaign since they aimed at achieving an undeclared objective: preparing to implement a burnt earth policy and total destruction through long-distance shelling, before the slow advance of the land forces in huge numbers. The aim was to reduce casualties, both dead and wounded.
Hence, from the military standpoint, the shelling of hospitals in northern Gaza (the Baptist, Indonesian, Al-Quds and others), after having been repeatedly threatened and urged to evacuate over the course of several weeks, and to drive the inhabitants southwards-- all this comes as a prelude to obliterating all housing units to facilitate a safe advance for the land invasion and further facilitate the task of engaging the Palestinian resistance by indiscriminate and destructive fire, despite the fact that this could escalate the international protest movement calling for the war to end.
The Dread of Dead Israeli Soldiers
Israel hopes to avoid the death or wounding of soldiers in many areas where the Israeli forces have penetrated, and where army engineers have built temporary command centers surrounded by sand barricades from behind which the army is able to target the heart of the city in various directions. Israeli officers state that they are not planning to fight inside the tunnels which HAMAS relies upon since these might be booby-trapped. Instead, they aim to destroy them.[8]
In addition to these practical military objectives, the targeting of Gazan hospitals is linked to an undeclared aim of this war. Israel desires to rain down severe blows upon the Palestinian population and not upon its military resistance wing. Following the Tufan al-Aqsa operation, an unprecedented desire for revenge has gripped the whole of Israeli society, a revenge so intense that 100 doctors who belong to an association called “Doctors for the Israeli Army” called for “the bombing of Gaza’s hospitals”, a declaration rejected by an Israeli association called “Doctors for Human Rights”.[9]
Many Israeli observers agree that these acts of shelling are strategically hazardous as regards the element of surprise and the directing of the battle inside enemy territory, and lead to the death, wounding and capturing of many military and civilian individuals. Like many Israeli observers, whose numbers have constantly increased in recent days, many have come to doubt Israel’s ability to achieve its war objectives or attain victory. Thus, to take one example, the Israeli political commentator Sima Kadmon affirms that no victory can be claimed in this war which has lasted too long. She explains this by asking: What sort of victory is it in a war begun by Israel when it lost 1400 of its soldiers and civilians before the war itself had even commenced? What sort of victory is it when there are 241 Israeli captives in Gaza? She argues that history will describe this as an Israeli defeat and not simply as a non-victory, if Israel fails to rescue the captives. For it has already failed to protect its citizens’ lives in the first instance and failed to rescue the captives in the second.[10]
The Search for Some Symbolic Achievement to Compensate for Military Failure
In addition to the passion for revenge, still burning bright among Israelis, and despite the fact that more than a month has elapsed since the Tufan al-Aqsa operation, there also exists a clear Israeli intention to compensate for the failure to achieve any military gains on the ground through targeting governmental institutions that represent the regime or state of HAMAS, even when these are civilian and humanitarian, such as hospitals. In directly shelling the principal hospital in Gaza, Al-Shifa, Israel is seeking an impression of a victory which may help it to claim that it is achieving the war’s declared objectives. This was revealed by some Israeli commentators, among whom was Alon Ben David, military analyst on Hebrew Channel 13, who supported the occupation of Al-Shifa Hospital as a symbol of HAMAS power. To demonstrate the “logic” behind the attack on that hospital, Ben David stated that such an occupation grants Israel the image of a victory, just as the invading American army in its war on Iraq in 2003 was quick to occupy Baghdad’s Presidential Palace. This statement was challenged by a colleague of his and fellow student of strategic affairs, former Knesset member Ofer Shelah, who argued that targeting Al-Shifa and other Gazan hospitals should be subject to military calculations and needs only. The search for an “semblance of victory”, he stated, meant that Israel was still captive to the mentality of earlier “bouts of fighting”, totally unaware that they were now in the midst of war. He warned of the danger to Israel’s image and standing in the world that comes from shelling Al-Shifa Hospital, in addition to the blatant immorality of the act.[11] This intense desire to achieve a “semblance of victory” by shelling Al-Shifa and emptying it, after having considered it a HAMAS redoubt, was also visible in the excessive attention paid in Israel to the pictures of white flags raised by women and children, who had only days before arrived from the north and were heading south under indiscriminate bombing. This prompted even French President Emmanuel Macron to state that Israel must cease at once its killing of Palestinian women and children.[12]
Repairing a Shattered Standing
The targeting of civilian institutions, including hospitals, has helped to repair the harm to Israel’s standing and deterrent capability, and to salve the feeling of frailty among Israelis who had lost all faith, not only in the Netanyahu government but also in the sanctum sanctorum, the army, and in the state---even in themselves. The future, instead of being certain, was now clouded by doubts. In the Israeli calculus, this is a strategic failure of very grave proportionss, for the Zionist movement has, for over a century and a half, been telling the Jews of the world that the Jewish state in the “Promised Land” would be, for them, the safest refuge and haven. Lo and behold, it turns out to be the most dangerous spot for them on the face of this earth. What if, in discussing the year 2023, i.e. some seventy five years after the creation of Israel and its proclaimed boasting of being a superpower with an invincible army, we find it engaged in a war against a single, besieged Palestinian armed faction, and not against states and regular armies as in the 1973 war? This is why we find some Israeli commentators arguing that the shock of Tufan al-Aqsa is more severe and dangerous than the shock of the 1973 war. At the same time, the indiscriminate shelling of hospitals, the wounded, the sick and the medical teams, aims also to dominate Palestinian consciousness and all enemies of Israel, in the hope of deterring them all from harassing it or using force against it in future. In this context, it is also intended as a direct message to Hizbollah. Officially, Israel declares that HAMAS uses the area beneath the Al-Shifa hospital as a military command center, but the pressure mounting against the hospital is specifically intended to prolong the attempt to create some momentous event whose psychological consequences far transcend those of Tufan al-Aqsa, approximating to a new Nakba inside the Gaza Strip. This in turn aims at engraving that event in the minds of the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Arabs and the world at large. Thus, the declared Israeli aim behind pressuring the hospitals and emptying them, and despite the mounting international protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, is to “neutralize” civilians. But behind that aim lie a number of practical, military and psychological purposes having to do with achieving solid gains on the ground without paying a high price. Fabricating a phantasy of a victory would help Israel, lessen its embarrassment, and fortify its self-confidence during a period when no real military gain on the ground can be pointed out, and no war aims have yet been achieved despite the fact that the war is now in its seventh week. Accordingly, Israel intensifies its “victories” over hospitals and civilians, and over women, children and the Gazan sick, having failed to win victory over HAMAS and Al-Jihad al-Islami and despite turning the Gaza Strip into a real hell.
[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231112-avi-dichter-labels-gazan-displacement-as-nakba-2023
[2] https://www.palestinercs.org/ar/Category/4/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1
[3] Posted on the France 24 television's page on 19/11/2024. As reported by the World Health Organization.
[4] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=662796092692003
[5] https://opt.who.foundation
[6] https://twitter.com/AvichayAdraee/status/1723053350
[7] https://www.news1.co.il/Archive/001-D-475421-00.html
[8] https://www.alhurra.com/israel-hamas-war-0
[9] https://fb.watch/oeZMimXwsu/?mibextid=Nif5oz
[10] "Yedioth Ahronoth," 10/11/2023.
[11] "Channel 13 Hebrew," 10/11/2023."