Culture Minister Miki Zohar declared on social media that “only the scum of the earth fires missiles at hospitalized children and elderly people in their sick beds”. The chair of Israel’s medical association, Zion Hagay, decried the strike as a war crime and urged the international medical community to condemn it.
This swift and unified condemnation by Israeli political and medical leadership underscores a striking contradiction: these same actors not only ignored but openly justified the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals over the past two years.
Israeli officials frame these hospitals as military targets and Hamas “shields”. Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, was placed under siege and then invaded, with the attack hailed by Israeli media as a victory.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Medical Association remained silent. In one of its rare statements after a year and a half of Israel’s repeated and targeted attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, the association echoed the state’s narrative, stating that health facilities and personnel must not be targeted “unless these are being used as a base for terrorist activities”.
This moment puts the international system to the test. While some medical and humanitarian groups have expressed concern, most international stakeholders have remained silent in the face of the destruction of Gaza’s entire health system.
Will medical journals, international associations and UN bodies respond to the attack on an Israeli hospital with the kind of swift condemnation and concrete actions they failed to take when hospitals in Gaza were bombed? The world should have acted when the first operating room was hit in Gaza. It should not take an Israeli facility being targeted for them to remember that hospitals are meant to be protected spaces.
If an attack on a hospital is a red line, this must be true for all hospitals, not just those serving Israelis. If international law is to mean anything, it must protect everyone, with the same standards applied to every violation. Anything less is not only hypocrisy; it is complicity.
I would say my thought on this topic, but for me as a german it would not end well.
If I speak out against Israel… they will call me a nazi. If I speak in favor of the jewish state, the other side calls me a neonazi. If I say both sides are too blame, both sides call me bad names. In the end I’m the bad one and the true arsonists have me as the one to point fingers at and deflect the view of the worlds from their cruelties.
Germany is deeply fucked. Use a VPN and a non-German fediverse instance, and don’t dox yourself.
@davel @Xande @palestine No offense, because it is in a way a noble effort, but the Lemmy network (it’s a bit more tucked away even if it is ActivityPub) is pretty fucked. There are dudes citing the Anti-Defamation League to discredit sources in my replies. I’m sure they never question the papers that sold them the Iraq War!
It depends on the Lemmy instance (and to a lesser extent the community). We have no tolerance for Zionists on lemmy.ml, and we’re not a freeze peach zone for crypto-Zionists Just Asking Questions.
@davel @palestine The network has been overtaken by Reddit powermods interested in hosting, botting, and burners with 3700 hateful replies. I had a very different view of tech libertarian leftism when I heard about it, or there would be no sentimentality.
I know they can’t moderate here by complaining, but it’s partly why the fedi has become an exercise in frustration. It’s not like it can crash, but I’m waiting for its next era.
You put my own feelings better than I could. Sure, .ml is good, but the fediverse as a whole is entirely dominated by the same neoliberal powermods that turned reddit into the rightwing cesspool it is, and who have successfully turned .ml and it’s users into pariahs.
Just because you’re German doesn’t mean you shouldnt call out what is essentially another Holocaust. In fact, you are in a very good place to make direct comparisons between the treatments of gazans and WWII concentration camps since you can personally visit them.
@Xande @geneva_convenience @palestine Lol, the more serious issue is you are saying it on a Zionist instance hosted in Germany that has tried to softpedal this issue before but will absolutely ban you.