Gareth Porter says the claim that the largest medical center in the Gaza Strip provides cover for Hamas is the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda, dating back nearly 15 years.
Medic carrying injured Palestinian child into al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11. (Atia Darwish, Palestinian News & Information Agency — Wafa — for APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Biden defends Israel incursion into al-Shifa hospital against Hamas ‘headquarters’ — The Hill. “You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military, hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact, that’s what’s happened,” Biden said on Wednesday.
- Nearly 24 hours after hospital raid no command centre, hostages, Hamas fighters nor arsenal is found — POLITICO (AP)
- ‘Israel has yet to produce findings that corroborate its claims that al-Shifa sits atop a Hamas headquarters and was central to the militant group’s operations in northern Gaza.’ – Washington Post, Thursday 2pm EST.
By Gareth Porter
Special to Consortium News
The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.
An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.
That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.
Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”
Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.
The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.
In justifying Israel's invasion of Gaza's Shifa Hospital, the Pentagon has essentially admitted that its own intelligence assessment asserting that Hamas military sites are concealed beneath the hospital is nothing more than recycled Israeli propaganda.
Sabrina Singh, the… pic.twitter.com/paEF5u8pf3
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 15, 2023
A History of Deception
The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.
That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.
Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.
Yuval Diskin in 2013. ( Ziv Koren, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.
[Related: Chris Hedges: The War According to Hamas]
Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”
The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.
IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post
Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.
In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.
IDF soldiers in Gaza on July 24, 2014. (Israel Defense Forces, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014 Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.
The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.
The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.
At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.
Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.
This is amazing. David Friedman, former US ambassador to Israel under Trump, says "it's been proven with certainty" that the Hamas Headquarters is under the Shifa Hospital. Asked for the source of this alleged proof, Friedman accuses @marclamonthill of doing Holocaust denial! pic.twitter.com/qXLii0n8CT
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 15, 2023
Maximum Suffering
But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.
So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospitals in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.
As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.
They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.
The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.
IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.
Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.
The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.
And now that Israel has control over many thousand of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.
The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.
Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, the should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
By their “logic,” the next time there’s a school shooter in the US, we need to bomb the crap out of school in order to get the shooter, and just to be safe, we should probably bomb the whole neighborhood lest the bad guy gets away.
Also, if every person in Israel is required to spend two years in the IDF, wouldn’t that make all adults “military targets”? (And yes they should be required to rename their military to Israeli Offense Force, just as the US should go back to the DOD’s title and call it the Department of War.)
IDF—does that translate into ISRAEL DOES FICTION—–as I think that if The word, “Israel was substituted with ADF as “America Does Fiction,” too
“You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military, hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact, that’s what’s happened,” Biden said on Wednesday. He lies constantly about Israel/Hamas conduct, starting from 40 beheaded babies (still not explained what prompted him to talk about them, febrile imagination of presentation by advisors). But many defend him for saying that Xi is a dictator, “he said the truth”.
Tragic and pitiful.
A question to ask the Pentago: does Saddam Hussein still have those weapons of mass destruction
that U.S. ‘intelligence’ agencies proclaimed with certainty?
Gareth Porter and several others of note have been reporting on this situation for years without any traction. It has all the potential of turning into a very bad dream. Whatever happened to the ‘will of the people’? If this turns into a general war with millions of victims, who is to blame?
Excellent work from Gareth Porter, as usual.
“…So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospitals in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza…”
That’s it in a nutshell, very similar to past episodes of Israeli attacks. It’s always the same ol’ BS: human shields, “command centers”
In a concentration/death camp of over 2 million people, reportedly the most densely populated place on earth, Israel can always use these BS excuses and lies. Urban guerilla warfare is just that, and to repeatedly use the same, tired excuse of “human shields” is pathetic and adding insult to mass murder. There is NEVER any excuse to attack a hospital.
Palestinians have no air force, no nuclear weapons, no army, no navy, they have been under siege for many years.
Sadly, the US gov can ignore public opinion, so Israel can do whatever it wants with impunity. Reports that a clear majority of US denizens want a ceasefire immediately can be routinely ignored. As Caitlin Johnstone pointed out: the US is not a democracy, so the ruling oligarchy can routinely ignore public opinion. Noam Chosmsky, Chris Hedges, the late Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and others have written about that for decades.
Here’s another 2014 article on the Israeli-built secure operating rooms and the supply tunnel network under the Al-Shifa Hospital, in the Israeli magazine Tablet: hxxps://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/top-secret-hamas-command-bunker-in-gaza-revealed
Given the sophistication of the October 7 action and the current resistance, it strains the credibility to believe that during a military operation Hamas would keep its headquarters in a place where its enemy has the blueprints of the layout.
It is unfortunately clear that International Humanitarian Law is at best an aspiration but one that will never beattained in the face of hypocritical immunity and a mass media dedicated to obfustation rather than truth.
When interrogating any claim – let alone one with no evidence to support it – considering ulterior motives for actions taken and deceptive rationales are a given. In the case of Israel, essentially every claim – barring possible gaffes, like a recent one made by an official admitting the existence of it’s nuclear arsenal – is propagandistic or cover for criminal acts. If it’s lips are moving, it must be lieing. The same is almost inevitably the case when U.S. or Western media “cover” Israeli atrocities. Only a light degree of pushback is now sometimes occurring due to a…you know, genocide underway. by
The Fog of War is certainly an inadequate description of information coming out of Gaza and Ukraine. Every war has propaganda and every country does it. But Ukraine seemed to bring it to a new level, and then comes along Israel. The Western world is in great need of independent journalism but we just don’t have it.
@ Gareth Porter
A concise and informative compilation of the sordid and deadly propaganda being used by Israel and its proxy collaborators to justify internationally illegal criminality.
A pox on any journalistic source that participates in the distribution of this abhorrent & deadly Bull Shit!
EA
“National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’ ” Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital. ”
When we look into the eyes of these bloodied, terrified children, its hard to imagine that such inhumane bastards like Sullivan are anyway but in prison for war crimes.
‘Human Shield’ is a modern term which does not make much sense in the Israel/Gaza context. It normally applies to a situation where a defending group forces civilians with a connection to their opponents (ethnic/religious) to the ‘front line’. Does the IDF really believe that Hamas is using its own people’s babies in incubators as Human Shields?
If it does believe this, or even if it doesn’t, it should start to show compassion (or its as not yet seen higher values) rather than taking the situation to its biblically disastrous conclusion.
Zionism is Lies. The talmud dictates that it is permissable to lie to, lie about, and kill goy, because goyim are sub-human.
I’d like a citation to your statement on this.
“Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, the should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.”
.
But they have; just not UNDER the hospital:
Xxxx://twitter.com/IDF/status/1724869758451888258
This is as pathetic as their claims of a recording of Hamas operatives talking about the bomb attack on the other hospital; the discovered Mein Kampf book (highlighted) in a child’s room.
Their justification for killing 11,000 innocent people including over 4,000 children is tantamount to fantasy.
Easy comparison: Veteran Affairs Med Center (Wash DC) houses weapons / war & troops for Russia China etc
Anytime officials from the Pentagon or U.S. State Department refer to “open-source” information to justify their actions or thinking, one can be assured it is the ripest b.s.
Yeah, but “open-source” sounds better than saying “We read it on Facebook and Twitter”, which is probably the truth. And as we know, you can BE virtually anyone and SAY virtually anything on those types of platforms, and people can even be impersonated, so their credibility is not very low.
Two thoughts on civilian human shields.
Where in Gaza could Hamas members go which wasn’t near non combatant civilians.
If you do not have an army with its own accommodation buildings then you will go home to sleep at night.