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The footage from inside Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted to social media on Wednesday following its operation to take control of the medical complex, was presented as something of a coup. In it, an IDF officer takes viewers on a brief tour of an MRI facility, pointing out several spots where he says IDF troops found “grab bags”—small, personal-sized duffel bags that contained weapons and military-style gear—allegedly stored there by Hamas. At one point, he shows what he says are the contents of one such bag, laid out for display on what looks like a gurney in a hallway. Items include ammunition, a live grenade, a tactical vest, boots, and an AK-47—what the officer describes as “full military kit for one Hamas terrorist.”
The footage from inside Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted to social media on Wednesday following its operation to take control of the medical complex, was presented as something of a coup. In it, an IDF officer takes viewers on a brief tour of an MRI facility, pointing out several spots where he says IDF troops found “grab bags”—small, personal-sized duffel bags that contained weapons and military-style gear—allegedly stored there by Hamas. At one point, he shows what he says are the contents of one such bag, laid out for display on what looks like a gurney in a hallway. Items include ammunition, a live grenade, a tactical vest, boots, and an AK-47—what the officer describes as “full military kit for one Hamas terrorist.”
Here, viewers were being asked to believe, lay the supposed proof of the justness of Israel’s siege within a siege: its military targeting of the largest hospital in Gaza, which it and the United States have maintained has served as a base for Hamas fighters.
The IDF also invited journalists from the BBC and another television crew into the MRI facility to view what Israeli forces said they found. The same IDF officer from the social media video showed the BBC reporter “three small stashes of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and bullet-proof vests” as well as “some military booklets and pamphlets, and a map that he says is marked with potential entry and exit routes from the hospital.” The reporter noted: “He says they have found around 15 guns in all, along with some grenades.” “Our visit was tightly controlled; we had very limited time on the ground and were not able to speak to doctors or patients there,” she added.
Later on Wednesday, the IDF deleted the video and reposted a slightly edited version that omits a few seconds of footage at the end that had appeared in the original version. That footage showed a captured laptop whose screen featured a photo of what the IDF officer said was an Israeli soldier being held hostage by Hamas. In the edited version, the laptop screen is blurred out, and the video cuts off before the officer mentions anything about a hostage. No reason for the edit was given, but it fed into existing doubts about the footage’s accuracy. Those doubts were further explored in a subsequent BBC report that pointed out discrepancies between what the IDF video showed and what the BBC reporting team saw during its walkthrough.
With Israel finally entering and beginning its inspection of the hospital on Wednesday, it will take more time to arrive at a conclusive assessment of the evidence behind this depiction of the hospital as a base. But as propaganda coups go, this first sally from inside Al-Shifa was underwhelming. That is because the capture of what appeared to be a relatively small number of weapons must be weighed against the pain and peril that Israel has inflicted on hundreds of hospitalized Palestinians as Al-Shifa has been cut off from electricity, fuel, and medical supplies while the noose around the hospital slowly grew tighter.
During the seizure of the hospital, communication with hundreds of patients, doctors, and staff inside the hospital was also largely cut off. One can imagine several purposes for severing contact with the people working, being cared for, dying, and simply being trapped inside a place like this, including valid security concerns. But regardless of the reason, one significant outcome is that it denies journalists and other observers real-time access to what is happening on the ground and deprives the world of independent sources of information about what is really going on inside.
As insistently as Israel and the United States have sustained claims that Al-Shifa has been used as a major base of operations for Hamas, the militant group—as well as hospital staff—has denied it. The early yield of publicly available evidence, such as the video of a purported weapons cache, would seem to fall well short of the idea that the hospital is anything resembling a military base. Nor has Israel provided any evidence yet of the underground command center and tunnels it said Hamas was operating beneath the hospital. More time, coupled with information from independent journalists who are able to perform their jobs freely, could, of course, eventually generate a different picture. That, in fact, is the only way of credibly establishing the truth.
International institutions such as the World Health Organization and civil society groups such as Human Rights Watch have denounced the Israeli siege of the hospital as a demonstration of wanton disregard for the lives of innocents, and in the case of the latter, something worthy of a formal investigation for war crimes. International law is not as helpful as one would like in defining what is or is not a war crime or when it is permissible to target a hospital as part of a military operation. There are too many gray zones where key questions are left open to interpretation.
Common sense and decency, though, are different matters. Depriving the seriously ill of electricity, or premature babies of incubators, or surgical patients of anesthetics and proper lighting rightly strike many people as a bridge too far. In recent days, as the hospital’s care has ground to a halt, it has had to resort to burying the dead in mass graves, and the hospital’s manager said dogs had begun feeding on corpses strewn on open ground. Unless there was heavy and active armed resistance to Israel from inside or underneath the hospital itself, it will be hard to justify the Israeli campaign against Al-Shifa, which is likely why U.S. President Joe Biden has very belatedly come around to publicly calling on Israel to protect human life there.
In a larger sense, though, Al-Shifa might be judged as almost beside the point. That is because of the nature of the broader Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has razed huge numbers of buildings there; killed as many as one out of every 200 inhabitants of Gaza; and driven a huge exodus of civilians out of the north into the overcrowded and also dangerous, if only somewhat less so, south of this embattled territory. Whether Al-Shifa is proved to have been a major operational base for Hamas or not, this broader Israeli campaign has taken on the quality of a collective and almost indiscriminate punishment on a scale that is rare in recent warfare.
As journalist Amos Harel recently wrote in Haaretz, “Most of the battlefields in northern Gaza will be unfit for human habitation for months, if not years. Entire neighborhoods of Gaza City and its suburbs have been destroyed, not to mention the quantity of ordnance that will be left in the area.”
There are no perfect analogies, but one of the best is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, Moscow’s tactics caused U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to declare before the United Nations, “We can never let the crimes Russia’s committing become our new normal. … Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal.”
In Gaza over the last six-plus weeks, these very things have become normal, as has a wave of Israeli rhetoric that openly proclaims a desire to flatten Gaza, while the United States has continued to show great reticence toward speaking out about what it would almost certainly denounce if similar tactics with a similar toll were being employed in any other conflict anywhere else in the world.
This brings me to the moral conundrum at the heart of this conflict. I am not calling it a war, because we usually think of wars as unfolding between states, and as monstruous as Hamas is, and as tactically impressive as its abhorrent murder and kidnapping spree into Israel on Oct. 7 was, Hamas has few of the attributes of a state and certainly does not represent the Palestinian people broadly.
In a terrible irony, what put me into mind of this conundrum was my reading recently of a famous work of Holocaust literature, Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1946 by the concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. A story Frankl tells, about the psychological state he and other recently liberated concentration camp prisoners were experiencing, has the power of a timeless parable and packs a universal meaning.
“During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life,” Frankl writes. He continues:
Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences. This was often revealed in apparently insignificant events. A friend was walking across a field with me toward the camp when suddenly we came to a field of green crops. Automatically, I avoided it, but he drew his arm through mine and dragged me through it. I stammered something about not treading down the young crops. He became annoyed, gave me an angry look and shouted, “You don’t say! And hasn’t enough already been taken from us? My wife and child have been gassed—not to mention everything else—and you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats!” Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
Where Frankl invokes the horrors of the Holocaust, we should think of the wanton murder and kidnapping of Oct. 7. If the Frankl of this anecdote were alive today, it is hard to imagine him agreeing with the “erase Gaza” spirit that has been voiced by many in Israel recently and which goes to the heart of tactics that raze entire neighborhoods. It is just such dehumanizing language and military tactics that have caused experts on the Holocaust and genocide to warn about the real danger that Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza could slide into genocide.
The only way to prevent this is to stop justifying any violent action the Israeli military takes in Gaza as legitimate, because its ultimate aim is to eliminate Hamas. Israelis whose society was the victim of the terrible events of Oct. 7 must not allow themselves to exult in more crude revenge, and the West, which rushed to support Israel in the wake of this horror, must find the moral courage to prevent the furthering of horror by speaking clearly about the unjust toll being inflicted on the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza who had no part in these events.
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