Even Nazi Germany Spared the Jewish Hospital in Berlin Which was Liberated in May 1945 with 800 Patients Still Alive
Before Israel’s Attacks on Al Shifa
It is instructive to compare Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health system with Nazi Germany. When Soviet troops liberated Berlin and entered the Jewish hospital on April 24 they were amazed to find that 800 patients, mainly Jews, were still alive.Before Israel’s Attacks on Al Shifa
In Budapest, between January 12 and 15, just before the Soviet Union liberated the city, The fascist Arrow Cross/Nyilas killing squads murdered around 240 patients at the Jewish hospitals in Maros and Városmajor Streets. Eugene Levai described this as ‘one of the blackest deeds of the Nyilas terrorism.’ [The Black Book of Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry]
The Garden at the Back of the Hospital
American Values – John Stewart
Israel’s massacres at Al Shifa and Al Nasser hospitals exceeds even the foul deeds of the Hungarian Nazis. Biden, Sunak and Cameron have nonetheless continued to supply Israel with the means with which to carry out further massacres. We are ruled by war criminals.
The perpetrators of the Budapest massacres were quickly rounded up and from February 3 1945 onwards were hanged by the Peoples’ Courts. Unfortunately Biden, Sunak and Cameron, to say nothing of that worthy successor to the Nazis, Olaf Scholz, are unlikely to face a similar fate.
Gaza and Hatikvah
Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals began with the attack on Al-Ahli hospital on October 17 when 500 people were killed. Israel blamed it on a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad, which Biden of course rushed to corroborate.
The West were happy to accept Israel’s denial of responsibility despite the fact that the evidence pointed to Israel being responsible. Israel supplied a digitally manipulated version of an alleged conversation between two Hamas operatives admitting responsibility, but the ‘conversation’ was clearly a fake. The overwhelming evidence was that it was an Israeli missile that had struck the hospital.
Next came the attack on Gaza’s main hospital Al Shifa. The pretext this time was that it contained Hamas’s Command and Control Centre. Even BBC Verify refused to accept the ludicrous ‘evidence’ that Israel provided included a bag of weapons that Israel claimed was stored by an MRI scanning machine. The contents of the bag kept changing throughout the day.
The IDF released a video of a ‘Hamas laptop’ they found with a standardised IDF numbered charger and a Hebrew keyboard. They soon deleted the video from Twitter and uploaded it again with a blurred screen!
The real reasons for Israel’s attack on Gaza’s hospitals are not hard to fathom. If the purpose of Israel’s attack on Gaza is ethnic cleansing then it is necessary to destroy Palestinian civil society. The health care system therefore has to go.
Dr Walter Lustig – Director of the Jewish Hospital
The same is true for the bombing of mosques and churches. Christians and Muslims happily lived side by side under Hamas rule but Israel bombed both religions’ institutions. The world’s third oldest church, the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius was bombed as have nearly all Gaza’s historical sites. But perhaps that too was a Hamas command post! Or maybe the Catholic Church of the Holy Family where Israeli snipers killed worshippers, meriting a rare Vatican condemnation, was also a Hamas command post?
Likewise the bombing of the trade union centre of the PGFTU in Gaza City which housed a bakery and kindergarten. It is obvious what Israel’s real game plan is and that explains Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s universities and all aspects of civil society.
Israeli Ministers have been open about their intentions. Likud Minister Avi Dichter openly talked about a second Nakba. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last week called for the ‘total annihilation’ of Gaza without so much as a word of protest or condemnation by Netanyahu.
Death of Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Dakka
But then there was no reaction from Genocide Joe Biden or his lapdogs Sunak and Cameron either. If Hamas had called for the wiping out of Israel then that would be front page news in the yellow press.
There are endless calls from Israeli Ministers for the mass murder of Palestinians, not just Hamas, including from Prime Minister Netanyahu with his invocation of Amalek. Israel’s Labor President Herzog did the same when he held that all of Gaza’s residents were legitimate targets. As the Guardian’s Chris McGreal noted, the language used by Israel is reminiscent of the genocide in Rwanda.
The West’s leaders are happy to justify any barbarity because to them the main enemy is Hamas whereas to most civilised people it is the Israeli state and its genocidiers who are the real criminals.
Western media outlets however either fail to report what Israeli Ministers say or treat each quote in isolation. Just as they refuse to see the context of Israel’s attacks as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing.
Before the International Court of Justice found a plausible case for genocide the US’s National Security Council spokesman John Kirby termed South Africa’s case as ‘meritless’. When the ICJ ruled all the Western countries immediately froze their aid to UNWRA whose job it was to prevent starvation in Gaza.
As Craig Murray, Britain’s former Ambassador said, the decision by Western states to stop funding to UNRWA, the UN agency charged with feeding the population of Gaza, was not taken in a single day. It was a pre-planned response to the ICJ. It was their way of showing their contempt for international law being applied to western imperialism. The International Criminal Court was established to judge tinpot African dictators not the West’s war criminals.
Israel of course supplied no evidence about UNWRA’s involvement in October 7 but what did that matter? The United States, Britain, Germany and the rest wanted to show their displeasure with the idea that they should be held to account. They were signalling their support for Israel’s policy of deliberately creating famine in Gaza.
So when Israel proceeded to attack other hospitals – Al Nasser, the Indonesian hospital etc., it didn’t even bother to offer any excuses because they knew that the Western leaders would cover for them and that the western media would say nothing and wouldn’t even bother to report it, still less place it in context.
North American Medical Doctors Statement
The bombing of ambulances, the murder of doctors, the invasion of hospitals were all ignored because at the end of the day the Western media reflects and amplifies the message of the West’s war criminal leaders that Israel’s goal is the elimination of Hamas rather than the elimination of the Palestinians.
What would have been condemned in an instant in Ukraine did not cause any reaction in CNN, the BBC or the Guardian. They chose not to join the dots because to do so would bring into question the imperialist narrative that Israel is engaged in ‘self-defence’.
Thus it was that when Britain’s pathetic Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rushed out of Downing Street to condemn the electors of Rochdale for electing George Galloway, warning of mobs on the street and Jewish children afraid to put their school uniforms on, he harkened back to the breakout from Gaza on October 7 when 1139 Israelis were killed, a third of them soldiers and over half the rest by Israel itself. Sunak ‘forgot’ to mention the 20,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 children who Israel had already murdered. To him they had never existed.
That Sunak, Starmer and Biden make no mention of the thousands of Palestinian victims, the deliberate targeting of people’s homes, ambulances etc. is no accident. Only Israeli lives matter. It took the murder of 7 aid workers of the World Food Kitchen before Western leaders found their tongues and condemned Israeli war crimes.
But even then they failed to draw any conclusions viz. that Israel’s targeting of aid workers was an essential part of a strategy of creating famine as an ‘incentive’ to the Palestinians to leave Gaza.
Biden was perfectly happy for Israel to investigate itself and blame a couple of junior officers who, when the dust dies down, will be reinstated into the Israeli military. It is as if it were usual, when someone commits murder for them to be tasked with the investigation! Perhaps if we extend this to burglary and rape and have the burglars and rapists investigate themselves we can dispense with the police entirely!
When Russia targeted a hospital in Mariupul that the neo-Nazi Azov battalion had occupied, having evicted the staff and patients beforehand, the Western press was united in condemnation. ‘Three dead as maternity hospital hit by Russian air strike’ reported the BBC, yet the same BBC has consistently failed to report the death of thousands of Palestinians from Israeli air strikes. Racism? Perish the thought.
When Israel, in the case of Al Shifa hospital, cut off the power and left babies to die as their incubators failed, the press said next to nothing. Israel forced the doctors and medical personnel out and the babies bodies were then eaten by wild animals.
Israel’s actions are clearly illegal yet, as we have seen, international law has effectively been scrapped. The ICJ was too timorous to call what Israel was doing a genocide or indeed to order western states not to supply arms.
Article 18 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War is quite clear:
Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.
Below I document the destruction of Gaza’s health system and also accounts from various doctors and health personnel of the situation on the ground.
HEALTH WORKERS FOR GAZA, ITALY
(updated to april the 2nd, 2024)
- 9 hospitals only partially functioning
- 25 hospitals out of service, 2 functioning at minimum level
- 24% of primary care facilities functioning
- 500,000 cases of acute respiratory infections
- 290,000 cases of diarrhea
- 17 operational medical emergency teams
- 8 out of 24 UNRWA medical centers functioning
- Source: OCHA OPT, Data updated as of 03.29.2024
- 311 healthcare workers arrested
- 484 healthcare workers* killed of which:
- 153 doctors*, dentists*, medical students
- 124 nurses* and midwives
- 181 paramedics*, pharmacists*, physiotherapists*, opticians* and administrative staff
Source: HEALTH WORKERS WATCH, Data updated as of 11.03.2024
As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues.
Feroze Sidhwa Mark Perlmutter
Apr 11, 2024 Common Dreams
On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon and a trauma surgeon, traveled to the Gaza Strip to work at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. Our limited sleep was constantly interrupted by explosions that shook the hospital’s walls and popped our ears, even well after the United Nations Security Council declared a cease-fire must be implemented. When warplanes screamed overhead, everyone braced for a particularly loud and powerful explosion. The timing of these attacks always coincided with “iftar,” when families in this overwhelmingly Muslim county broke the daily fast of Ramadan and were most vulnerable.
We as Americans must acknowledge that we are responsible for this crime against humanity, now in its seventh month and unfolding in full view of the entire world.
We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world. Every square inch of the hospital’s floor is taken up with makeshift tents where displaced families live, desperate to find some semblance of safety. They are the lucky several hundred who get to live indoors, unlike the tens of thousands sheltering outside on the hospital’s grounds.
As we got to work we were shocked by the violence inflicted on people. Incredibly powerful explosives ripped apart rock, floors, and walls and threw them through human bodies, penetrating skin with waves of dirt and debris. With the environment literally embedded in our patients’ bodies we have found infection control to be impossible. No amount of medical care could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here.
As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering. Collectively, we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have worked in the deprivation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a patient.
But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being unable to treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis.
The United States has heavily funded and overwhelmingly armed what is called “the occupation” of Palestine, but the term is misleading. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, declared that the existence of the Palestinians was simply “a matter of no consequence.” Thirty years later, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told the Israeli cabinet that the Palestinians “would continue to live like dogs…and we will see where this process leads.”
Now we know: This is where it leads. It leads to Gaza European Hospital, and to two surgeons realizing that the blood on the floor of the trauma bay and the operating room is dripping from our own hands. We Americans provide the crucial funding, weapons, and diplomatic support for a genocidal assault on a helpless population.
‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened
During the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital, the Israeli army shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil government employees.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj April 11, 2024 24
Human heads eaten by crows, unidentified and decomposing body parts, and hundreds of corpses piled up and buried in mass graves are all that remained of the victims of the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital. The grim scene was something out of a dystopian movie, the product of the two-week siege of Gaza’s largest hospital that ended in its total destruction.
Following the completion of al-Shifa’s decimation, the Israeli army announced that it had been one of the most successful operations since the start of the war, claiming that it had arrested hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members in the medical compound. But the question that no one seemed to ask is how such a massive number of so-called “operatives” from Hamas and PIJ had gathered at al-Shifa with the full knowledge that the place had already been combed by the army once before and that Gaza City had been occupied by the army ever since.
The case of al-Shifa: Investigating the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital
Washington Post
JERUSALEM — Weeks before Israel sent troops into al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.
The claims were remarkably specific — that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The assertions were backed by “concrete evidence,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said as he laid out the case in an Oct. 27 briefing.
After storming the complex on Nov. 15, the IDF released a series of photographs and videos that it said proved its central point.
“Terrorists came here to command their operations,” Hagari said in a video published Nov. 22, guiding viewers through an underground tunnel, illuminating dark and empty rooms beneath al-Shifa.
But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials. That raises critical questions, legal and humanitarian experts say, about whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.
The Post’s analysis shows:
- The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
- None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
- There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
Watch this brand new video from Mondoweiss: https://fb.watch/rdAWIU4A5W/
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