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Photo:
Palestinian children receiving treatment at Kamal Adwan Hospital, last week. Credit: Stringer / Reuters. Published by Haaretz
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Haaretz Editorial
Dec 30, 2024

The Israel Defense Forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia on Friday, for the third time. According to the World Health Organization, the operation forced the last working hospital in the northern Gaza Strip to suspend operations. Fires broke out in the hospital's laboratory and surgery department, and five medical staff members, including a pediatrician, were killed by IDF fire.

Around 350 people who were in the hospital were forced to leave and to undress. Some of the patients were transferred to the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which the IDF also raided last week.

Kamal Adwan's director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, whose son Ibrahim died in an Israeli airstrike on the hospital in October, was arrested by the army. His fate is unknown. Three Gaza physicians have died in Israeli prisons during interrogation or from lack of medical care.

According to United Nations data, 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.

Reports on foreign TV stations regarding the events in Gaza hospitals – Israeli TV television eschews such coverage – show heartbreaking images of children dying on floors covered with blood, untreated wounded people groaning in pain and terrible overcrowding.

On Sunday, the IDF claimed that it had arrested over 240 terrorists at the hospital and that its director is suspected of being a Hamas operative. To prove this assertion, the army released pictures of two pistols and a knife found in the hospital.

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.

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 above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.