The influential Israeli daily, Haaretz, charged today in its lead editorial that the systemic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and medical personnel by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are violations of the Geneva Convention’s statutes forbidding war against hospitals, and its purpose appears to be that of “ethnic cleansing.”
The editorial details how the IDF permanently closed the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, detained the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, and inhumanely mistreated its patients, forced to strip and walk away in the cold.
But it is not just Kamal Adwan. “Three Gaza physicians have died in Israeli prisons during interrogation or from lack of medical care,” Haaretz reported. It cited UN data that “1,057 health workers have been killed since the start of the war in Gaza. The health care system has collapsed due to the high number of casualties, the army’s destruction of hospitals and a shortage of medicines, beds and staff.” The “heartbreaking images” from Gaza’s hospitals have not been broadcast on Israeli TV, but on foreign stations, the editorial reveals.
Yet the only “evidence” given by the IDF to justify its claim that Kamal Adwan was shut and its personnel and patients so treated, because it was an alleged terrorist center, Haaretz reports, was that two pistols and a knife were found in the hospital!
“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.
“In the absence of medical facilities, northern Gaza will be emptied faster, as the sick and wounded flee south in an effort to find care. Such a large area cannot be left without hospitals, especially in wartime.
“The Fourth Geneva Convention accords 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.
“Northern Gaza has been destroyed and devastated; the IDF is now mainly engaged in completing its destruction. This is an illegitimate action, and in any case it is prohibited to include hospitals,” the editorial concludes.
To those who might object that Haaretz’s carefully worded editorial does not use the word “genocide,” we remind them that the daily is publishing under wartime conditions of military censorship, and many government ministers have already been demanding that it be shut down.
