Fury over Gaza hospital blast surges across Middle East
BEIRUT — Israel and its staunch ally the United States were targets of rage, condemnation and protest that surged across the Middle East late Tuesday into Wednesday, blamed by demonstrators and regional governments alike for a deadly blast at a hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of people.
Protesters took to the streets from Morocco to Iran, in angry marches held in front of Israeli or U.S. diplomatic missions or those of other Western allies of Israel, like Britain and France. The blast at the hospital in Gaza City, which Palestinian officials blamed on an Israeli airstrike, was branded an outrage and a war crime. Israel said it had evidence the strike was the result of a misfired rocket launched by a Palestinian militant group.
In the midst of it all, President Biden landed in Israel to show solidarity with its government. Arab leaders canceled a planned meeting with him in Amman, however.
Little attention was paid to Israel’s denial of responsibility in the region, including from powerful governments like Saudi Arabia — which in recent months had been exploring normalized ties with Israel. Riyadh condemned what it said was a “heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government restored relations with Israel recently after a long period of strained ties, tweeted that “hitting a hospital containing women, children and innocent civilians is the latest example of Israel’s attacks devoid of the most basic human values.” Protesters burned Israeli flags in front of the country’s consulate in Istanbul.
The protests were set off by the carnage at the Gaza hospital but reflected mounting public revulsion at the spiraling Palestinian death toll after more than a week of Israeli airstrikes, analysts said. The anger posed a challenge to Arab governments leery of protests of any kind, as well as those that have either concluded, or are contemplating peace deals with Israel, in an effort spearheaded by the United States.
Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official speaking to reporters in Beirut Wednesday, called on Arab and Muslim states to “end all forms of normalization and cooperation” with Israel and to expel its ambassadors from their countries.
Late Tuesday in Beirut, demonstrators marched to the U.S. Embassy, as the army barricaded the site to prevent protesters from reaching the facility. Some arrived before they were prepared and reached the embassy gate. Others hit the barricade with their fists in an attempt to tear it down.
One man climbed atop the fence and planted a Palestinian flag, to thundering applause. Soldiers and police officers tried to disperse the protesters with water cannons and tear gas. After midnight, demonstrators set fire to a small building near the embassy.
“What happened today was a crime against humanity; it’s a war crime,” said Ali Abdsatter, a protester. “It’s not just about the hospital, it’s the whole damn thing,” he added, referring to the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. “It’s been happening for decades.”
But the bombing of a hospital “has to be turning point,” he said, noting the spreading protests in Jordan, where mass demonstrations have been held for days, and elsewhere. “I hope this expands everywhere.”
The U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory for Lebanon on Tuesday to the most severe level, warning Americans not to visit the country and authorizing the departure of family members of U.S. personnel.
In the Middle East, “the public mood is hotter than it’s been in a very, very long time,” said H.A. Hellyer, an international security studies expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Of course, the presumption being that this was an Israeli missile strike,” he added. For that to change, “the Israelis are going to have to produce really ironclad proof to show that it wasn’t them, and I don’t think they can do that.”
Significant popular anger is directed at the United States and the West more broadly for what the region’s inhabitants consider “incredibly deep-throated support for ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’” Hellyer said.
“That phrase still continues to be used, even against the backdrop of now multiple times more civilians being killed as a result of Israeli strikes in Gaza as compared to Israeli civilians killed as a result of Hamas,” he added.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank protested and clashed with Israeli and Palestinian security forces Tuesday night. Their anger was also directed at the muted response to the war by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s archrival, which governs pockets of the West Bank and is seen by many Palestinians as a security subcontractor for Israel.
In Egypt, a small group of leftist and liberal political figures chanted outside the U.S. Embassy, “Down with Israel. Down with the American administration,” a rare display in a country where protests are effectively banned. Videos posted on social media Wednesday showed crowds waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans in Alexandria.
Large crowds of university students took to the streets Wednesday in Minya, some 160 miles south of Cairo, according to numerous videos posted on social media. In one, young men chanted: “Where is the Arab army?”
Street protests of this sort are almost unheard of in Egypt, where the authoritarian government of President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi has cracked down hard on any public expressions of dissatisfaction. But Sisi, in remarks at a news conference German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo on Wednesday, suggested the Egyptian public would protest any move to forcibly displace Palestinians to Egypt’s northern Sinai region — a comment seen as a veiled threat to mobilize the Egyptian people if necessary.
Anger is mounting, too, near the Egyptian border, where truck drivers organized by the Egyptian Red Crescent have been waiting for days to be given the green light to bring humanitarian aid through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.
In one video posted on TikTok on Tuesday night, a man — apparently involved in the aid effort — yells at the camera: “If there is bombing, I’ll go in. If there is death, I’ll go in. I came here determined to go in.
“I have nothing to regret. … The people are helpless, they keep dying, waiting for the stuff we have here. We have been waiting and standing here for five days.”
In the Tunisian capital, demonstrators demanded the expulsion of the French ambassador. France is the former colonial power in the country.
Protesters gathered in Tehran and lit tea candles to remember those killed at the hospital. Later, protests targeted the embassies of France and Britain — major Israeli allies that have supported Israel’s military response to attacks by Hamas.
In a statement Wednesday, Cairo-based Al-Azhar University, the world’s preeminent institution for Sunni Islamic learning, called on “the Arab and Islamic world” to “radically reconsider its dependence on the arrogant American and European West.”
It urged Muslims to use their power, money, wealth and “whatever equipment you own” to “stand behind Palestine and its oppressed people who are facing an enemy that has lost conscience and feeling, and which has turned its back on humanity and morals and all the teachings of the messengers and prophets.”
Parker reported from Cairo.