Try as it might, the Associated Press can find no evidence of any Hamas presence in hospitals in Gaza. “Medical facilities often come under fire in wars, but combatants usually depict such incidents as accidental or exceptional, since hospitals enjoy special protection under international law,” AP reported overnight on Nov. 3. “In its year-long campaign in Gaza, Israel has stood out by carrying out an open campaign on hospitals, besieging and raiding at least 10 of them across the Gaza Strip, some several times, as well as hitting multiple others in strikes.
“It has said this is a military necessity in its aim to destroy Hamas after the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. It claims Hamas uses hospitals as ‘command and control bases’ to plan attacks, to shelter fighters and to hide hostages. It argues that nullifies the protections for hospitals. ‘If we intend to take down the military infrastructure in the north, we have to take down the philosophy of (using) the hospitals,’ Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said of Hamas during an interview with The Associated Press in January after the first round of hospital raids.”
AP covers the raids on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, but says that the focus on Al Shifa overshadowed what was done at other hospitals. AP’s focus here is on Al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan Hospitals in northern Gaza, about it which the news agency spent months gathering accounts, interviewing more than three dozen patients, witnesses and medical and humanitarian workers, as well as Israeli officials. AP found that Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence in those cases. AP presented to the Israeli military spokesman’s office a dossier listing the incidents reported by those it interviewed. The office said it could not comment on specific events.
AP provides gut-wrenching accounts of the violence, death and destruction wrought by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on all three hospitals to the point that people fear going to them. AP finishes its report, saying: “Despite often suggesting hospitals are linked to Hamas’ underground networks, the military has shown only one tunnel shaft from all the hospitals it raided—one leading to Shifa’s grounds. In a report last month, a UN investigation commission determined that ‘Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the healthcare system of Gaza.’ It described Israeli actions at hospitals as ‘collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza.’
“Some patients now fear hospitals, refusing to go to them or leaving before treatment is complete. ‘They are places of death,’ Ahmed al-Qamar, a 35-year-old economist in Jabalia refugee camp, said of his fear of taking his children to the hospital. ‘You can feel it.’ Zaher Sahloul, the president of MedGlobal, who has also worked in Gaza during the war, said the sense of safety that should surround hospitals has been destroyed. ‘This war has become a scar in the minds of every doctor and nurse.’”
