The Courtyard and Parking Lot at Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in
Gaza City the morning after the bombing [photo credit: Mohamed Al Masry]
Yesterday an IDF spokesperson hectored and lectured BBC Radio 4’s
Mishal Husain. In a nearly 10 minute rant, Lieutenant Colonel Peter
Lerner blamed the BBC for the protests that have erupted in countries
across the Middle East. He was outraged at the suggestion that Israel
submit to an independent process to confirm the IDF’s version of events
that an Islamic Jihad rocket fell short of its target and hit the
hospital. “We do not target hospitals” he said despite the fact that Al
Ahli Hospital had been hit and damaged in an Israeli airstrike on 14 October.
Hamas chose to go to war against Israel. We will win this war
because we are right. Anybody with a decent bone in their body needs to
acknowledge this terrorist organisation cannot hold us hostage ever
again. It has to release the 199 hostages and also let go the poor
people of Gaza Strip who are also being held hostage. This terrorist
organisation must be banished from the realm of existence.
(You can find the full interview and Jeremy Bowen’s response here beginning at 08:16)
Palestinians inside and outside Gaza and many independent observers
will argue with good reason that the opposite is true: it is Israel who
is holding 2.3 million people hostage inside what has been called the
world’s largest open air prison.
Israel had already ordered the complete evacuation of all hospitals
in North Gaza. Ehab Bader is a Canadian paediatrician volunteering in
the neonatal unit of Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital. He has 40 newborn
babies under his care most of whom are being kept alive on ventilators,
incubators and monitors. As of Monday the hospital had only enough fuel
to keep the generators that supply electricity running for another 24
hours. He told the Globe and Mail
newspaper “If we run out of electricity, that’s it, they will die on
the spot.” Dr Bader said the evacuation order posed a huge logistical
challenge. And for those babies as well as others needing medical
equipment such as ventilators and dialysis “most patients we have would
not survive.”
The immediate analogy that comes to mind is of the Khmer Rouge
emptying the schools, homes and hospitals of Phnom Penh in their brutal
campaign in the 1970s. This is the image, the reality that Israel is
now projecting and no amount of hasbara, of hectoring and bluffing can conceal that reality from the eyes of the world.
On Tuesday evening another IDF spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht when asked about civilian casualties told Newsnight’s Emir Nader he was “amazed at these questions coming from the BBC.” He then went on to say:
We don’t target civilians. We are doing everything we can to
minimize collateral damage. There is no humanitarian crisis right now in
Gaza. We asked people to move. There is water and electricity. I am
focussed on what happened to the Israelis.
By any measure it was an extraordinary claim to make with civilian
casualties in Gaza constantly rising and clear evidence that the Israeli
decision to cut off water, food, electricity and medical supplies in
the wake of the Hamas onslaught is causing an enormous humanitarian
crisis.
As we noted in our Tuesday newsletter
the Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared that there is no
distinction between Hamas fighters and civilians in Gaza: “it is an
entire nation out there that is responsible….We will fight until we
break their backbone.”
Such statements mean that even as a pro forma hasbara exercise
Israel cannot express condolences to civilian Palestinian victims and
their families. The IDF spokespeople and the government are themselves
hostage to a narrative that is verifiably and obviously false.
President Biden was supposed to be meeting with Arab leaders as well
as Benjamin Netanyhu yesterday to discuss ways forward. After his plane
touched down in Tel Aviv he promptly accepted the Israeli version. Later
in the day he announced that Israel would allow a humanitarian corridor
to be opened. But by that point a summit in Amman with Jordan’s King
Abdullah, President Sisi of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority’s
Mahmoud Abbas had already been cancelled.
Arab states including all those who recognise Israel as well as Saudi
Arabia have condemned the attack. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman who was warming to the idea of joining the so-called Abraham
Accords immediately before 7 October used his foreign ministry to state:
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia condemns in the strongest possible
terms the heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces….
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia categorically rejects this brutal
attack which is a flagrant violation of all international laws and
norms, including international humanitarian law, and denounces the
failure of the Israeli occupation to stop its continuous attacks against
civilians despite many international appeals.
The United Arab Emirates, the driving force behind Arab states
normalising with Israel echoed the Saudi statement as did countries
across the Arab world. Beyond calling for restraint, Western leaders
have been conspicuous by their silence.
Whatever the facts of the Al Ahli bombing, the narrative that has
lodged points blame at the Israelis. That they reject out of hand an
independent assessment that might help to shift the narrative, that they
stick to absurd claims that are verifiably false, that they continue a
bombing campaign when what is needed is a ceasefire, that they escalate
when de-escalation would help to temper the global revulsion that has
come their way, all are a measure of a public relations war that they
have lost disastrously.
Meanwhile the region and the world is on a knife edge waiting to see
what will happen next. Now must surely be the time for Israel to step
away from the red mist of rage it has descended into.