Turns out Hamas was always doing what Israel and opponents of jihad terror accused them of doing: Operating out of hospitals to avoid being bombed (in violation of international law). I was already going to write about this when I saw that Jim Geraghty had already done the heavy lifting.
What would you like Israel to do about the Hamas operations under the Al-Shifa hospital complex and other hospitals in the Gaza Strip?
A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and its equipment to that spot.
The decision before Israel is to either attack the Hamas targets underneath hospitals while attempting to avoid civilian casualties, or to leave the Hamas operations intact. Attack, and you run the risk of higher Palestinian civilian casualties, even greater outrage on the world stage, and even more propaganda victories for Hamas, painting the Israelis as cruel monsters. Hold back, and Hamas gets to keep more of its men and arms safely in place to fight another day and plot more massacres.
For those who wonder if Hamas really does operate underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, here’s an account from Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, back in 2008:
At Shifa Hospital on Monday, armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls. Asked their function, they said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late twenties asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head. A bit of brain emerged on the other side of his skull.
Hajoj, like five others who were killed at the hospital in this way in the previous 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges, and when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
Another account from El-Khodary in 2009 described a young Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter demanding he be treated first, ahead of civilians, even if their injuries were more severe:
A car arrived with more patients. One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.
“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors.
He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.
“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”
A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.
“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
Like everything else in the Gaza Strip, it appears that the hospital’s operations were intertwined with Hamas — a deliberate strategic choice to make the line between military operations and innocent civilians as blurry as possible.
So the left has known that Hamas was committing war crimes for decades, but was willing to ignore it in service of the holy cause of slaughtering Jews.
Here’s an Israeli soldier narrating what they found in a Gaza hospital, namely weapons and a prepared area for hostages.
Speaking of Al-Shifa hospital, there’s quite a lot of military activity happening there right now:
There should be no cease in Israeli operations until they’ve finished the tasking of killing or capturing every Hamas terrorist they can lay their hands on.
Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israel-Hamas War, Jihad, Jim Geraghty, Military, video, war crimes
Hamas and the rest of the terrorist world (inclusive of their mentors, the Soviets/Russians/Communists) have never held to the letter or the spirit of international law of conflict. They’ve always used it as a tool against their enemies, leveraging it for every advantage they could get.
It’s a mark of their intrinsic evil, the expediency they always go for.
My personal take? They should all be held to the standard; get caught out of uniform or among civilians? Immediate drumhead court-martial followed by summary execution. No appeal; no mercy, right there on the battlefield.
Had we done that with the assclowns of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, then ISIS would never have formed, because the founders would have all been dead, instead of being there handy in Camp Bucca for the Obama assclowns to release. You have no damn idea how many times we’d capture and release these fuckers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t a goddamn war so much as it was a fishing derby, with JAG serving as the judges that were on the side of the fish…
Left up to me? About 90% of JAG would be tried as enemy combatants, and executed alongside the people they were truly advocating for. I sat there in the 101st Airborne’s D-MAIN for a year, right in front of the JAG element in the command center. I overheard them talking, I watched what they did. They were manifestly not on our side; they saw their job as preventing the US Army from winning. Most of those fuckers were “activists” that deliberately used the Army to pay for their legal education, and who had taken commissions in JAG with malice aforethought, to do the most damage possible to “the man”.
There were a couple of good ones, but they were few and far between. Most of the JAG officers I witnessed were more about making their bones by prosecuting US soldiers for what were really minor transgressions and follies. The terrorists? Those fuckers could do no wrong, in their eyes.
[…] signs agreement with French company to harvest coffee and export it all to France BattleSwarm: Hamas’ Hospital Hideout Behind The Black: Musk: Government approval for 2nd Starship/Superheavy launch expected before […]
An inexplicable fellow named Major Preston Stewart has made a video on the above commentary by the IDF. He does not appear satisfied. If anyone can stand it, could someone go watch and try to understand what he’s talking about?
“There should be no cease in Israeli operations until they’ve finished the tasking of killing or capturing every Hamas terrorist they can lay their hands on.”
It is better to capture them, if possible. The Palestinian Authority’s Martyrs Fund pays the families of prisoners a stipend for the duration of a captive’s imprisonment. The money dedicated to welfare payments cannot be used to purchase jihadi armaments. This way, you burden the Palestinian Authority’s treasury while restricting the lethality of Islamist terrorists.
“ It wasn’t a goddamn war so much as it was a fishing derby, with JAG serving as the judges that were on the side of the fish…
The Israelis freed 1,000 captives in exchange for one of their soldiers. While a noble sacrifice, it only served to embolden the Palestinian Authority and furnished them with additional cannon fodder. I don’t expect the Israelis to repeat that mistake this time.
The sane way to deal with terrorists is to treat them strictly by the letter of international law of armed conflict. You’re an illegal combatant, captured under arms out of uniform, or breaking other customary laws? You need to be dead, dead, dead. Fair trial, by all means, demanding proof of criminal activity.
But, you need to be dead. Period. The preservation of civilization demands that. Had we nutted up and done that in Iraq? None of what happened with ISIS would have happened, because all those psychotic bastards would have been dead, not there in Camp Bucca to be released by the Obama Administration.
Lots and lots of people don’t know about that deal. The majority if ISIS cadre were once prisoners at Camp Bucca, and when Obama’s people deliberately crashed the Status of Forces Agreement negotiations and we left Iraq, they specifically told the Iraqi government that they had to deal with those assholes by releasing them, rather than killing them. We got the whole ISIS deal out of that, because that cadre immediately went to work in Northern Iraq and Syria doing what they did.
Obama made that happen; the lot of those criminals and thugs should have been summarily executed, rather than coddled. I have to partially blame Bush for leaving them there to be released by Obama, to further his pose as a magnanimous humanitarian…
Our leadership is cowardly and scum-like. Can’t get around that basic fact.
[…] Hamas’ Hospital Hideout. “So the left has known that Hamas was committing war crimes for decades, but was willing to […]
Two days ago. Russia fired a grad barrage at a hospital in Kherson City. A grad is an indiscriminate area weapon. Throughout the Ukraine War Russia has targeted hospitals, clinics, schools and apartment buildings. Look at pictures of their cities and villages that have been leveled. Not a peep from the ‘international law is what we say it is’ brigade to any of that, but they’ll shed bitter tears because Hamas is experiencing the war they started with ghastly atrocities.
Disgusting.
If they didn’t have double-standards, they would have no standards at all.
Saw that many times with regards to JAG in the Army. If you were a US soldier ambushed from a mosque or other prohibited structure? Return fire…? That’s a minimum of a 15-6, violating Rules of Engagement. God forbid you kill any of the terrorists you returned fire on might die, because then you’ll be blamed by your own side’s lawyers for not getting proper clearance from them for doing so… And, they weren’t about to grant that, either.
I literally observed them in real-time, working out the calculus that the lives of US soldiers were of less value than the “cultural monuments” they were being fired on from.
Our. Own. Lawyers. Think about that, for a second: They would habitually take the side of our opponents. Seem reasonable, to you?
We have been betrayed by our own, the people we entrusted with high status and leadership in our society. Any other conclusion is delusional.
Founded in 1987, the logo for Hamas shows the dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas claims Jerusalem as the capital of an Islamist Palestine. No others will be permitted. There is no basis for compromise or peace, since Hamas will eliminate all others (not just Jews).
In a fair world Obama and his crew should be tried Nuremberg-style and hanged. How many Christians and innocent Muslims paid with their lives for Obama’s no