Israeli Forces Storm Hospital Dressed as Civilians
A disturbing report.
AP (“Israeli undercover forces dressed as women and medics storm West Bank hospital, killing 3 militants“):
Israeli forces disguised as civilian women and medical workers stormed a hospital Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, killing three Palestinian militants in a dramatic raid that underscored how deadly violence has spilled into the territory from the war in Gaza.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire inside the wards of the Ibn Sina Hospital in the town of Jenin. The ministry condemned the raid and called on the international community to pressure Israel’s military to halt such operations in hospitals. A hospital spokesperson said there was no exchange of fire, indicating that it was a targeted killing.
The military said the militants were using the hospital as a hideout, without providing evidence. It alleged that one of those targeted in the raid had transferred weapons and ammunition to others for a planned attack, purportedly inspired by the Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that triggered the war in Gaza.
Footage said to be security camera video from the hospital that circulated on social media showed about a dozen undercover forces, most of them armed, dressed as women with Muslim headscarves or hospital staff in scrubs or white doctor’s coats. One in a surgical mask carried a rifle in one arm and a folded wheelchair in the other. The forces were seen patting down one man who kneeled against a wall, his arms raised.
[…]
The military said in Tuesday’s hospital raid, forces killed Mohammed Jalamneh, 27, who it said was planning an imminent attack. The two other men killed, brothers Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi, were hiding inside the hospital and were involved in attacks, the military claimed.
The military did not provide details on how the three were killed. Its statement said Jalamneh was armed with a pistol, but made no mention of an exchange of fire.
Hamas claimed the three men as members, calling the operation “a cowardly assassination.”
Hospital spokesperson Tawfiq al-Shobaki said there was no exchange. He said the Israelis attacked doctors, nurses, and hospital security during the raid.
“What happened is a precedent,” he said. “There was never an assassination inside a hospital. There were arrests and assaults, but not an assassination.”
He said Basel Ghazawi had been a patient in the hospital since October with partial paralysis.
All of the reports I’m seeing on the incident are either other sites using AP wire copy or “re-reporting” of the AP story. The Daily Beast reposts a cell phone video of the attack from Twitter.
The main sources for the report are Palestinian but there are vaguely-attributed reports from the Israeli military that seem to confirm the broad details.
The Palestinian sources seem to be most outraged by the fact that the IDF stormed a hospital to assassinate militants. While it makes me squeamish, it’s quite possibly justifiable under the laws of war, if Hamas is using it as a base. On the other hand, soldiers disguising themselves as noncombatants in order to gain military advantage is almost certainly an act of perfidy, arguably the most heinous of war crimes because it endangers the very existence of laws of war.
To be sure, Hamas is a nonstate actor that is neither a signatory to international law nor an adherent to it. That does not, however, change Israel’s obligations.
If these were people who were actively planning attacks, wouldn’t it have made more sense to capture them so that they could be interrogated, rather than simply executing them? I mean, that would make sense if Israel’s political leaders actually wanted to make progress in this war, rather than simply extend it forever to protect their own jobs…
I believe Israel does not recognize the International Criminal Court. Whatever happens, Hamas is not going to conquer Israel and prosecute Israelis. The IDF is unlikely to prosecute soldiers for acts (presumably) ordered by the IDF. This seems very much like the Trump administration violating democratic norms. Int’l Humanitarian Law provides a basis for discussion, but nothing more.
Trying to discern right and wrong in a war where both sides are killing each other to take each other’s land is an obscene waste of time.
I guess I’m not seeing how this is different from Israel and other governments hunting down enemies in areas that aren’t active combat zones? If this was a hospital in Qatar, or Turkey or anywhere else, targeting a Hamas leader there, I wouldn’t expect Israeli forces to be uniformed.
I seem to remember people complaining that Israel should not be attacking Gaza to avoid killing the civilians Hamas hides behind, under, and among, and instead should hunt down Hamas leadership as a strategy. Well, this is what that looks like.
As @Andy: points out: this is exactly what critics of Israel have called for in lieu of bombing. Accusations of genocide to follow.
Look, it’s not hard. The IDF and Israel treat Palestinians as if they were insects. That’s why there are videos of Palestinian kids and elderly holding white flags and being shot by IDF snipers, and there are videos of IDF troops beating up random Palestinians in the West Bank, where this took place and where settlers and the army do whatever they feel like against Palestinians.
This is not a movie version of good guys taking out ‘terrorists’, where the good guys agonize over what lines to cross. The Israeli government and the military are an occupying near-genocidal force and they do not care at all about Palestinian lives, innocent or not. And this is a small taste of what happens.
@Modulo Myself:
‘Near-genocide.” Right. The kind of ‘near genocide’ that results in a steadily growing population. Isn’t it time for you remind us that Jews drink the blood of Christian babies?
Not everyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-semite. But some clearly are.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ll be honest Michael. I doubt you believe I’m an anti-semite. You are simply a childish blowhard and you don’t know how to respond, so you hit on calling me an anti-semite.
@Michael Reynolds:
A few days ago, the International Court of Justice, “the highest court in the world, the apex of the United Nations, has found there is a plausible risk that Palestinians’ right to be protected from a genocide are under threat from Israel’s actions.”
So fifteen of the seventeen judges on the panel that made that ruling are anti-Semites?
Grow up.
James Joyner: “…if Hamas is using it as a base.”
There’s a wide gulf between using a location as a base and a few Hamas guys being present at the location at that particular time. I hope the IDF knows the difference, but I’m not optimistic. And I agree with wr’s comments at the top of the list.
@gVOR10:
This.
@MarkedMan:
This. These complaints are reminiscent of the British redcoats whining about American colonists sniping at them from trees and bushes, instead of lining up in formation like gentlemen based on the norms of the day. I mean, come on.
Trumpism will not be defeated with traditional norms-based politics that hamstring its opponents via assymetrical warfare. And you can’t go after evil, vicious barbarians like Hamas within the confines of International Law. So the idea that 7 Oct did not “change Israel’s obligations,” au contraire. It most assuredly did.
That said, Israel’s goverment is now so far outside the boundaries of norms and laws that it is actually making Israel more isolated and less safe — proving again that Netanyahu and his far right ilk are demonic, dumb, and demonically dumb.
Israel is killing Palestinan civilians waving white flags, a policy which saw the IDF gun down three of the hostages they’re supposed to be saving.
Israel’s policy in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing with open support of settler terrorism, an abrogation of both international law and US policy.
The upper reaches of the Israel government — including literal convicted terrorist Itamar turned Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir — are now openly calling to extend this genocidal ethnic cleansing into Gaza and to “resettle” Gazans?
Where? ??? Nobody knows. Into cemeteries perhaps. Because the Arab/Muslim world — for all its big talk and opportunistic outrage — will not even take in Palestinian refugees temporarily, let alone permanently.
So there is plenty about this situation that is disturbing, but this particular hospital operation is waaaay down the list of outrages.
Are some of the IDF soldiers in that photograph wearing blackface?
The hands of the one in front don’t seem to match their face.
@Andy: It seems like this should matter, at least a little bit.
On the other hand, soldiers disguising themselves as noncombatants in order to gain military advantage is almost certainly an act of perfidy, arguably the most heinous of war crimes because it endangers the very existence of laws of war.
Or is Israel above inconsequential things like war crimes?
@Andy: This is, without a doubt, less worse than bombing the living shit out of civilian areas and killing 25,000 people. It is also less worse than Hamas’ attack on October 7th.
It’s less worse than attacking civilian infrastructure and cutting off access to food, fuel and water.
I would even say it is less worse than an economic blockade.
Dressing up as civilians and carrying out a targeted assassination in a hospital may be a war crime, but it’s less worse than a lot of things that aren’t war crimes.
They even seemed to get actual Hamas folks rather than “militants” that were just kids throwing rocks at an occupying army.
All around, a pretty ok operation, compared to everything else.
@DK:
There is no way to take in Palestinian refugees temporarily. No one believes that Israel would let them go back to their homes.
Accepting refugees at this point would be enabling ethnic cleansing. That might be better than watching as Israel kills 25,000 civilians, but let’s be realistic about what it would be — a resettlement.
And it would encourage Israel to bomb more and try to get as many Palestinians to leave as possible, which it why it only might be better than doing nothing.
I don’t think the Arab countries in the area are necessarily thinking about that last point, but they definitely do not want a permanent refugee population in their countries.
This sounds like a targeted assassination, nothing like genocide. (For the most part claims of genocide distract from what is going on I believe.) Hamas agrees it was their people so I think that justifies this event. However, it is in the context of the IDF and settlers attacking Palestinian civilians who are not Hamas and not apparently doing anything wrong. I’m guessing they weren’t all that civil to others in the hospital and were pretty disruptive. Hard to believe this was the only place and time they could be caught.
At the risk of a tangent this reminds me of so many police raids in the US. They think there is a bad guy in some house. Instead of waiting until they come out they go in guns and flash bangs blazing, kill the pets and injure bystanders. Plus, not surprisingly, they occasionally have the wrong address or the bad guy isn’t there. Or they dont properly announce themselves and someone wakes up to their house being invaded and they make the mistake of fighting back. In this case the Israelis were willing to risk a firefight in a hospital. I hope there was a good reason for taking that risk.
Steve
@Gustopher: One possibility for what the Israeli’s have in mind: Have the US cover all of Egypt’s foreign debts in exchange for opening up the southern border hand letting the IDF drive the Palestinians into Egypt, where they will build permanent refugee camps.
@Gustopher:
Meh. This excuse only flies if the call were to empty Gaza entirely. But that’s not what’s being asked.
Egypt has a border with Gaza that it controls. Egypt could temporarily take in a few thousand Palestinian women and children, to ease some of the strain in southern Gaza. It’s time to ask why they won’t. They may well have valid reasons, let’s hear them. Nobody is saying resettle millions of people, but these Arab/Muslims nations can be doing much, much more to help Palestinians than they are. If they really wanted to help.
We also need to ask why when the Arab/Muslim world controlled all of the West Bank and Gaza from 1947-1968, they declined to create a Palestian state. What’s the excuse there? That had nothing to do with not wanting refugees.
Israel’s neighbors are skating by with far too little pressure and scrutiny, and the excuses are wearing thin. I think some of these Middle Eastern countries like having Israel around to get slammed for doing their dirty work, so they themselves escape the heat. Some Muslim countries have even resettled their Jewish populations into Israel, but they can’t house and feed some Palestinians? Mmm. The whole setup reeks of opportunism and hypocrisy.
Suddenly people care about perfidy when they think it’s the Jews doing it, seemingly obvious to how it’s been SOP for decades for Hamas and other groups.
IANAL, but as a legal matter, I don’t think perfidy applies here. The West Bank is not part of the war zone or part of the conflict. This looks like it was a Shin Bet operation and not a military operation on territory that de jure is controlled by the PA, which is not a party to the conflict. Again, I would analogize it to assassinating enemies as Israel used to frequently do with the PLO, Nazi’s and others decades ago. And if these personnel were Shin Bet, then they aren’t subject to LOAC requirements for wearing uniforms for the same reasons that CIA personnel are not. This very well could be a crime in the same sense that any government-sanction assassination is a crime.
The other thing I’d say to those complaining about this, is: what’s your alternative?
The irony is that this kind of operation is one that is the least likely to result in innocent loss of life compared to the alternatives. And this was perfectly executed operationally. Only the bad guys died – unless you’re a fan of Hamas. There wasn’t a shootout. The hospital wasn’t bombed. What’s the more perfect scenario critics think would have been better with the benefit of hindsight?
@Modulo Myself:
Bullshit. You may be too ignorant to know that you are employing an anti-semitic trope, although I have explained to you that ‘genocide’ is inaccurate and a word chosen by anti-semites because it diminishes the real genocide that occasioned the founding of Israel.
Apartheid? Yep, that tracks, not exactly, but close. ‘Ethnic cleansing?’ That is certainly what a lot of Likudniks want. But actual genocide? That is literally Hamas’s charter. They explicitly intend to kill every Jew.
So, yes, I do believe you are an anti-semite.
As for others downstream, what hypocrites some of you are. You spend two words making mealy-mouthed denunciations of Hamas larded with, ‘but it’s really the Israeli’s fault,’ and when the first Israeli bomb lands you scream, Genocide! And the first tank? Genocide! And now it’s still Genocide! when the Israelis do exactly what you fucking insisted they do.
As of right now, after 4 months of fighting, 98.5% of Gazans are alive, despite the Genocide!
At it’s peak Auschwitz alone murdered 15,000 Jews every day. Those Jews had not attacked, murdered, taken hostage, tortured, raped or sexually mutilated Germans. They were innocents. And it is their extermination that you mock by calling this a genocide.
You, Modulo, are at best an insensitive, historically ignorant, posturing nitwit, working like the useful idiot you are, to bring on an end state that would mean the elimination of the only nation in the ME with a free press, freedom of speech, protections for women and gays. The only nation where an Arab can vote, or serve in a democratic government. And no doubt congratulating yourself on your virtue as Hamas and every Nazi wannabe in the world, laughs.
@Gustopher: Damning (?) with faint praise. Interesting view.
ETA: “There is no way to take in Palestinian refugees temporarily. No one believes that Israel would let them go back to their homes.”
Yet another salient point. 🙁
@Andy:
To expand on this further, doing this as a military operation would be characterized as a de facto invasion of the West Bank and a military attack on a hospital by the usual suspects. The people currently complaining about perfidy would instead be complaining about that, only those complaints would actually have some merit.
In short, the Israeli military assaulting a hospital in the West Bank would be a lot worse in a lot of ways than this very well-executed, mostly likely, Shin Bet operation.
@steve: Somebody cue up “A fire fight in a hospital is nothing compared to what Hamas did.”
@DK: “Temporarily?” But on the whole, you make a point worth factoring into the discussion.
@DK:
“This excuse only flies if the call were to empty Gaza entirely. But that’s not what’s being asked.”
You appear to be listening to different people than I do. I have heard lots of people saying that emptying Gaza (and the West Bank) of Palestinians is exactly what Israel should push for.
@Andy: Suddenly people care about perfidy when they think it’s the Jews doing it, seemingly obvious to how it’s been SOP for decades for Hamas and other groups.
Didn’t the excuse that “Johnny did it last week and he didn’t get in trouble” pretty much end once you started junior high school? The North Vietnamese killed and tortured civilians, that didn’t excuse My Lai.
@Michael Reynolds:
The UN definition of genocide does not match yours. It does not require population to even go down. Feel free to look it up.
I don’t think it’s a useful word to use in this case, as it gets into pedophile/ephebophile debates, but the UN definition would apply.
I also don’t think “terrorism” is a particularly useful word to use in Israel-Palestine. There’s been an armed conflict there for my entire life, with varying levels of hotness and tactics between the occupiers and the occupied. “Terrorism” is just a tactic to make the people who support the occupation feel some of the price for that occupation.
I’m not going to condone the attack of October 7th, but I’m also not going to condemn it without at least asking what conditions led to it. It’s not normal behavior, and it required some pretty extreme desperation for things to get to the point where that seems like the right thing to do.
This isn’t the Unabomber sending out packages in his war on fingers or technology, or the deranged gunman in Pennsylvania or wherever it was shooting up a synagogue. Coordination — large scale coordination — requires more grievance than just antisemitism. The antisemitism is just a tool and serves as a shorthand for every other grievance.
Are Hamas leaders antisemitic? Probably*. Are the people of Palestine antisemitic? Pretty sure that generations of occupation would make them that way even if they didn’t start out that way. But is antisemitism the cause, or is it a symptom? It’s a self-reinforcing cycle at this point, and the hardest part of that cycle to change, so it kind of doesn’t matter.
——
*: just as we have political grifters who don’t believe a damned thing, I assume everyone else does to. They definitely play in antisemitic spaces.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: “less worse” is not faint praise. It’s significantly less worse, one might even say better.
But better implies good. And sometimes none of the alternatives get all the way to good.
Less worse is often the best we can hope for. As Stalin always said, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
@Moosebreath:
Members of the Israeli government have said this, and not been removed from their roles. If it’s not official policy, the Israeli government is certainly comfortable with it as an idea.
@Andy:
One thing that has bothered me about the hospitals: I would’ve framed it around a policy of taking over management the hospitals in order to insure they are well supplied and fully operational instead of a need to hit them because HAMAS is using them. This would’ve prevented much of the bad press they are getting now.
Strikes me as unlikely the IDF is dumb enough to have not thought of this.
@dazedandconfused: The 7 Oct security failures, and much of what has come after, have certainly dimmed once-lofty views of Israeli intel. Bury it alongside the now quaint paens to Putin’s strategic genius.
Seems we’re all flying blindfolded in the dark.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Temporarily. Like Ukraine’s neighbors are temporarily housing Ukrainian refugees pending the end of Putin’s genocidal warmongering.
The problem is that once we start to discuss why Arab nations are wary of taking in Palestinians — and why they did not create a Palestinian state when they controlled the terroritories now in dispute — we have to start discussing Muslim infighting more broadly. Including Egypt and Israel’s others neighbors having been attacked from Gaza and the West Bank by Palestinian terrorists.
Then when we do that, the usual excuses for 7 Oct — ‘it’s an inevitable result of Israel’s brutal colonization etc.’ — begin to fray at the edges. After all, Egypt is not an occupying colonizer. Why would Palestianian militants attack Egypt?
Then, to answer those questions we’d have to discuss a rot in Palestinian and Muslim extremist culture, which is difficult for some to do without veering into outright racism and Islamophobia. So decent-minded people tend not to go there at all.
The truth is at, as someone pointed out above, among Middle Eastern political leadership there is a dearth of good guys, Israel’s Likudist leaders included. The US should not allow itself to be dragged into an intractable ethnoreligious conflict between Zionist and Islamofascist extremists determined to fight each other to the death.
@Moosebreath:
In my first comment above, I noted that Itamar Ben-Gvir and his genocidal ilk are plotting ethnic cleansing via “resettlement” or worse.
So, in context, I’m obviously referring to those with the desire to see Palestinian suffering improve, when I refer to those not wishing to see Gaza emptied.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has allegedly told the US he will not allow Israeli settlers to setup camp in Gaza. Whether this is good cop / bad cop kabuki theater or not, who knows? But Gallant has long been at odds with Netanyahu. So we’ll see, I guess. I would not bet against Israelis terroristic right, since thus far no amount screwup seems to precipitate their downfall.
@dazedandconfused: If the Israelis had “[taken] over management the hospitals in order to insure they are well supplied and fully operational,” that would mean having to provide medical services to Palestinians. I’m not sure that such a program is one of the goals Israel has for the West Bank. I’m pretty sure it isn’t, TBH.
@DK: Maybe I’m too cynical, but I have to admit that I believe that Israel’s plan is to not have any Palestinians return to Gaza (and to have, eventually, displaced all of the ones living in the West Bank area, too). From that standpoint, I have to question how temporary any refugee status would turn out to be.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Still a red herring argument. Egypt and other Arab nations could agree to assist with housing and feeding a few thousand Palestinian women and children, without helping Israel empty Gaza completely of the 2 million souls that live there.
So I don’t buy the excuse. They can help some without needing to relocate every single person out of Gaza.
@Michael Reynolds:
It would be one thing if you said it’s arguable what his happening in Gaza does not fit the definition of genocide. But no, you have to believe that nobody who thinks this is genocide–not the Jewish people who are saying so or the scholars who study genocide who believe it is–knows anything about antisemitism, blood libels, the Holocaust, or history. They’re just idiots or Nazis out to get Israel, and I am as well, I guess.
So you are obviously lying. If not to me to yourself. You are not isolated person and you know as well as I do that I’m right. Jewish people and people who study genocide say this is genocide. They may be right or wrong. But you can’t handle that so you enter a state of hysteria and proceed accordingly.
@Michael Reynolds:
How many of the 25,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza attacked, murdered, took hostage, tortured, raped or sexually mutilated Jewish Israelis?
Oh, they only killed 1.5% of the population, so I guess that’s ok. If you were to have polled Gazans before the bombing, and asked them if they were alive, this is almost certainly within the margin of error of that hypothetical poll. So it’s like it didn’t happen at all.
I get it. You don’t think a Palestinian life is worth as much as a Jewish Israeli life, or maybe anything at all. And anyone who holds a Palestinian life to be worth even 1/20th an Israeli Jewish life is antisemetic.
Also, I think that Gaza were probably derail Biden this election. Old boomers are not equipped to deal with reality and whether it’s Pelosi or the rank-and-file like Michael Reynolds, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Scroll down this twitter users feed. This is what social media is putting out everyday. If it’s not people with white flags being shot by snipers it’s the creepy IDF-generated videos where they have Gazans in a bus reciting how their the slaves of an Israeli family, or something.
The thing about American propaganda during WW2 was that it was positive. They weren’t doing tik-toks of soldiers cutting off Japanese ears and mailing them home to their sweethearts. They knew the difference between right and wrong. The meathead Israeli government does not and its enablers and fans in the US are clueless.
As Malcolm X said, chickens coming to roost. Unfortunately, it’s going to give us a Trump dictatorship. But hope it was worth it in the boomer cocoon!
@Gustopher:
I get it. You don’t think a Palestinian life is worth as much as a Jewish Israeli life, or maybe anything at all. And anyone who holds a Palestinian life to be worth even 1/20th an Israeli Jewish life is antisemetic.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s true. Normal Americans were never equipped for these things. That goes for Biden. Had his administration not followed Jared Kushner’s foreign policy lead and instead focused on at least getting Netanyahu to like use the IDF to defend Israel rather than defend terrorist settlers, the attacks might never have been effective.
This was a long term catastrophe going back to the imbeciles who responded to 9/11 in America (and were, mostly, at least in the media, rewarded), and the bottom line is that the fighting the ingrained racism against Palestinians was never part of any plan.