If Hamas struck a hospital treating Netanyahu it would not be justifiable. But the laws of war are forgotten when Israel violates them.
Free Palestine protest around the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2024. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Israel and its genocide cheerleaders are claiming Israel’s air strike on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza Sunday night — which killed several patients and staff — was justified because a Hamas politician was being treated there for injuries from an earlier Israeli strike.
Israel has also seized on the fact that a Hamas official was in the hospital to retroactively rationalise its destruction of Gaza’s entire health sector, leaving more than 2 million Palestinians with barely functioning medical care in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign.
At the weekend, the Israeli army blew up the entire Turkish Hospital in Gaza and did so without any possible military justification. Its soldiers had been occupying the hospital, using it as a military post, for much of the past year.
The hospital had served its purpose for Israel – and Israel sees no purpose for Palestinian hospitals actually serving the Palestinian population. After all, Israel’s goal is to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and that is made easier if Palestinians have no surviving medical facilities in the enclave.
BREAKING | Israel destroys the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, near the Netzarim Corridor, Gaza. pic.twitter.com/p1oC0gb1CI
— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) March 21, 2025
Once again, Israel’s “justification” for the latest attack on Nasser Hospital doesn’t even bother to suggest it accords with any known principle of international law.
Here are a few reminders about the long-established laws of war that only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.
Even fighters are considered non-combatants — that is, not legitimate targets for military attack — when they are injured and no longer engaged in combat. That rule applies even more obviously to politicians.
All Israel’s hospitals, such as Rambam in Haifa, regularly treat Israeli soldiers injured in combat. Israeli hospitals are doing so right now — Israel makes no secret of this.
No one, least of all the people defending last night’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza, would for one moment consider it legitimate for Hamas to bomb Rambam Hospital, killing patients and staff there, to hit an injured soldier being treated at the facility.
But what Israel did is even more clearly a violation of the laws of war because it bombed the hospital to hit an injured Hamas politician, not a fighter.
That is the equivalent of Hamas striking a hospital in Israel, killing Israeli staff and patients, to assassinate an Israeli politician.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently spent several days in the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem for a prostate operation.
Had Hamas hit the hospital, can one imagine Israel and its supporters — or Western politicians and media — accepting that as legitimate grounds for a military attack? The question doesn’t even need asking.
The only reason it is okay for Israel to attack a Palestinian hospital, killing Palestinian civilians, to assassinate a Palestinian politician is because the western political and media class are out-and-out anti-Palestinian racists.
Palestinian life is meaningless to them. Israel calls Palestinians “human animals” — and Western leaders secretly concur.
Once Jews were seen that way — as human animals. Their lives were worthless. They were killed on an industrial scale across Europe.
Today’s Europe is no different, nor is the U.S. It’s just that Jews are no longer the objects of the West’s institutional racism and its structural violence. Palestinians are.
The West’s racism that led to the Holocaust is still with us. We have not learnt from history. Our politics has not evolved beyond that of our great-grandparents’ generation. The Gaza genocide is our generation’s Holocaust. And we are equally complicit.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
This is one of those times in history when speaking out is a moral imperative. Those who do not are complicit. It will be interesting to hear the lame excuses when the tables turn as they most definitely will.
I recall once reading the reminiscences of an elderly Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. And his observation was that if the German Nazis had been persecuting any group other than Jews, then the German Jews would have willingly gone along with it. Because they were good Germans and respected the German authorities.
It seems that the wheel has turned to the point where Israeli Jews can persecute Palestinians and other groups (who are not Palestinian) will go along with it because they respect the Israeli authorities. Because of the Holocaust against Jews.
Thank you, Jonathan Cook, for keeping our attention on this. Because, 10 or 20 years from now there will be a lot of people asking how this could have happened, right before the eyes of the people who could have spoken out.
Nazism is a permanent human state. Humans did what Nazis did before the Nazis. Humans do what Nazis did after the Nazis. Nazism is iconic of this state. Israelis were accepted onto the side of Nazism.
And we are equally complicit.??? No, John, we, meaning you and I, are neither responsible nor complicit in the crimes against humanity, e.g. the attempted genocide of the native population of Palestine, but the Zionist controlled US and EU politicians are the enablers and therefore the only ones responsible for the slaughter of innocents, not us!!!
Hmmm, well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly pay taxes to the US govt, which, in a tiny way, enables the work it does. Thus, I have a share of responsibility in the work done by my money.
As Thoreau discussed in Civil Disobedience, one is not obliged to stop all injustices happening in the world. One is only obliged to make sure, to the extent he can, that he is not contributing to same.
Now, are we brave enough and hardy enough to go to jail (since the tax is mandatory) for our beliefs? Well, I haven’t been.
I agree Konrad with your stance on politicians. They are the enablers. But likewise i feel that anyone who does not speak out on this slaughter of innocents, is equally complicit. Silence is complicity.
Speaking out is being done plenty, does it stop the slaughter, of course not even if I go and stand myself in front of an IDF tank or in front of an IDF jet ready to take off for another genocidal bombing run…I will be dead in a flash…there is nothing I can do because I am not in a position of power required to stop the US and the IDF…so I am not complicit because speaking out I do, weeping for the victims I do, silent I am not..so what else is expected from me sacrifice my own life too hoping my death will stop the slaughter…? anyway I refuse to go along with John on this particular guilt trip, that’s all..compassion I have plenty for those suffering life in the Gaza and other places of US sponsored and enabled state terrorism!