The big news out of Israel yesterday was the reported bombing of the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba by Iran which reportedly wounded 200 people. The Iranians insisted that they hit military targets in that area, an IDF communications center and a Mossad facility, and that the Israelis are charging Iran with bombing a hospital in order to use the attack as a propaganda weapon against Iran.
The hospital’s director general Prof. Shlomi Kodesh told the media, “A missile hit the old surgical ward building at Soroka. It’s a relatively old building that had been evacuated in recent days.” He added, “There is widespread damage to other buildings at the hospital. All patients and all staff were in shelters. The several injured we have are lightly hurt, mostly from the blast shockwave.”
The Times of Israel claimed there are no military facilities closer than 2 km from the hospital. It cited the IDF saying claims circulated by Iranian media that Soroka Hospital was used as a military facility were “lies.”
“The claim of an attack on an intelligence base or the presence of military equipment under the hospital is another lie. We are not so despicable as to endanger civilians,” the IDF said in a Persian-language statement directed at the Iranian population. “Attacking hospitals is a crime. Fabricating a reason does not justify it,” it adds. In short, Israel accused Iran of doing what it has done in Gaza dozens of times with attacks on hospitals which it claimed were being used by Hamas to plan terrorist operations but without ever providing evidence of those claims.
The Iranians accuse Western countries of having launched a campaign aiming to use Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israeli military centers as a pretext to form an international coalition for intensifying the aggression on Iran. A “wave of media and diplomatic reactions has started in the West and Israel seeking to pave the way for intensifying strikes and engineering a global consensus against Tehran through resorting to playing blame game and highlighting civilian casualties,” said an unattributed statement published by Mehr News.
“Israeli media has initiated a propaganda at the medical center to take advantage of the incident, turning it into the symbol of Iran’s crimes in a bid to prepare the ground for the international arena to pile more pressure on Iran,” it says. The statement notes that the Western media campaign doesn’t mention Israeli crimes, including its war of genocide in Gaza. “Instead, it presents a biased narration to the global audience, drawing attention to the emotional and biased consequences of Iran’s response, not explaining the reasons of the natural reaction.”
