The health care is ‘on its knees’ as Israel orders Gaza hospitals to evacuate
The Israel attack on the Gaza hospital is a win-win strategy for the security of the state of a military compound, argues Human Rights Watch
“The destruction affecting hospitals in Gaza is becoming unbearable and needs to stop. The lives of thousands of civilians, patients and medical staff are at risk,” said William Schomburg, head of International Committee of the Red Cross’ sub-delegation in Gaza.
” Hospitals have specific protections under international law, and there should be the utmost care to protect them,” says Wesam Ahmad with the human rights group Al-Haq based in the West Bank.
The Israeli military has repeatedly singled out Al Shifa in statements in recent weeks, saying that the hospital gives cover to a Hamas military compound. Last month, the Israeli military’s spokesman said that Hamas had control over the different departments of the hospital.
This is part of a larger discussion about civilian casualties. More than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza since fighting began Oct. 7, mostly civilians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Most of the 1,400 dead in Israel from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack were also civilians, according to Israeli officials.
“For Hamas, this is a win-win strategy,” said Pnina Sharvit’s, who was a top legal adviser on military operations.
Israel can either not attack the military infrastructure because civilians will get killed, or it can. Or Israel does attack. Sharvit Baruch is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“I’m particularly worried about the risk of indiscriminate attacks because of the way Israel is conducting the war,” said Bashi of Human Rights Watch.
However, this shield is not absolute. If a hospital is used by an armed group to carry out acts that are harmful to the opponent, it can lose its protected status.
Any revenge would have to be done with care. A lone gunman firing from a hospital wouldn’t give an army the right to destroy the entire building, according to lawyers.
Hamas is not an enemy of Gaza: Dr. Abu Salmiya, a doctor’s daughter, and a human rights activist
The former Israeli military lawyer, Sharvit Baruch, spent years working with Israeli commanders as they compiled target lists during times of relative calm.
There were videos verified by The New York Times that said a projectile hit the hospital courtyard and displaced Gazans were resting overnight. The people’s screams could been heard. One man was filmed lying on the ground in pain, with his leg apparently mangled. Dr. Abu Salmiya said that four strikes had landed in various parts of the hospital complex, including the maternity building and the outpatient clinic, killing seven people on Friday.
Thousands of Palestinians are camped out on the grounds of hospitals hoping to get a bit more safety than other places in Gaza, a territory bombarded almost round-the-clock.
Human Rights Watch is looking into this attack on Shifa hospital, since Israel said the Hamas fighters were leaving the hospital, not attacking it. She claimed that Israel did not give any warning of the strike.
She said that the nations in the world have agreed on these kinds of rules. The Israeli military is not agreeing with the rules.
Hamas targeted Israeli civilians with scores of bombings in the 1990s and early 2000s, including the massacre in southern Israel.
The group holds about 240 hostages, most of them civilians, and during the past month, has fired thousands of rockets in ongoing attacks directed at civilians in Israeli cities.
Several videos shared online by witnesses showed people injured in a courtyard that is part of the Al Shifa Complex, which has also served as a shelter for the displaced and injured since the Israeli incursion began.
“We’re aware of the sensitivity of the hospitals. That’s why we’re slowly closing in on them,” the Israeli military spokesman, Richard Hecht, told reporters on Friday night.
He said that Israeli forces generally do not fire on hospitals but that they will do what needs to be done if Hamas fires from hospitals. He said Israeli troops were close to Hamas in northern Gaza.
He said the intensive care units were filled and that frustrated doctors had to leave many seriously wounded people.
“If conditions were better than this, we could have saved their lives,” Dr. Abu Salmiya said. He said that from the hospital there was armed fighting and powerful explosions.
Doctors at Al Shifa have faced dire conditions , treating a growing number of patients even as medical supplies and fuel needed to power generators have dwindled.
The bare minimum is what we can offer for the wounded in our care. We can not provide complex operations because we don’t have the capacity or the medication.
Hamas in Gaza: “On its Knees” and “Deasely Dead” — the Director of the Al Shifa Medical Complex
Hamas officials and Al Shifa administrators have denied the accusations. Dr. Abu Salmiya said international organizations were welcome to investigate the site and see if they could find any evidence of Hamas’s presence there.
Inside the Al Shifa hospital itself, staff members were preparing for the worst, including a potential Israeli ground raid into the hospital, Dr. Abu Salmiya said. They have no immediate plans to totally evacuate the complex, he added.
Israel’s military pressed ahead Saturday with a campaign to force the evacuating of hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip so it can pursue Hamas, it believes are taking cover there.
Increased Israeli pressure on Gaza’s hospitals to leave over the last couple of days has caused an overtaxed medical system in the area.
Israel’s military said it surrounded Al Rantisi and told everyone to leave, including staff, patients and civilians sheltering on the hospital grounds. The military said Hamas fighters were also present and tried to prevent civilians from leaving. The military said lots of people left by foot or ambulance. The “terrorist” who held around 1,000 people at Rantisi was killed by Israel.
With the forced evacuations and ongoing military bombardments from Israel, Gaza’s medical system is “on its knees,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO’s director-general said on Friday that the organization had documented five attacks on five hospitals in a single day in Gaza in the previous week. Half of Gaza’s hospitals and twothirds of the primary health care centers are no longer functioning.
The Israeli military maintains it has not directly targeted a hospital, but the health officials in Gaza say the Al Shifa Medical Complex has been hit five times in recent days.
The largest hospital in the Gaza Strip went out of business on Saturday because it had lost power. The Ministry of Health said its intensive care and pediatric departments and the oxygen equipment stopped working.
The situation facing hospitals is tragic in every sense, according to the director of Al Shi Fa Medical Complex.
Human Rights Watch is investigating the Israeli airstrikes on a hospital in Gaza strip that have killed at least seven people, including three children. The hospital has been identified as Al Shifa Hospital by Hamas and the Israeli military. Doctors at the hospital said the airstrikes were indiscriminate and that several patients were injured in the strikes.