Eyeless in Gaza

I was waiting for the elevator in one of our local hospitals when my phone started to vibrate last Tuesday afternoon with the news—reported as simple fact by the Bing-Microsoft news service that funnels breaking events into my personal news feed—that Israel had intentionally blown up a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 hospital staff and patients, including children. Then the elevator came and I got into it. By the time I got out on the ninth floor, the original story had been “confirmed” by the New York Times. So how could it not be true?

Two hours later, the original message was gone—magically withdrawn into thin air—and unretrievable. The original Times banner “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was also gone, replaced with the slightly (but only slightly) less inflammatory “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” But the damage was done. Not everybody who has an iPhone that features ongoing news alerts is as involved in news from Israel as I am. (Could anyone be? Maybe. But no one could be more emotionally and personally involved in the events of these last weeks.) And a fair number of them, I’m guessing, just quickly scanned the first headline, then filed it internally as yet one more terrible thing Israel has done to the innocents of Gaza. And so a scurrilous story—one that for me (and for anyone who knows as many IDF veterans as I do, and who has the respect for the IDF that it deserves) could not possibly be true—gains traction. By evening, the murder of these poor innocents was lighting up X, formerly Twitter, as though it were an established fact, as though it were a story featuring confirmed reality that only a willfully blind Zionist would even try to deny.

But, in fact, the story was not true. Or rather it was not true as reported. Yes, a terrible explosion killed hundreds at the al-Ahli hospital (also called the Baptist Hospital) in southern Gaza. And it is also true that all the victims appear to have been innocent civilians. But the IDF insists that it did not target that hospital and that, as far as they can tell, the damage was done by a missile intended by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to murder Israeli civilians that misfired and landed in Gaza not far from where it was launched. And they also noted that the IDF is bound by rules of combat that specifically forbid its servicepeople from slaying civilians indiscriminately. And then, shortly after that, the P.M., Bibi Netanyahu himself, issued his own statement on Twitter saying plainly and unambiguously that this was not the work of the IDF.

Later, the President of the United States said clearly that American intelligence supported Israel’s claim of non-involvement. Plus, the hospital, it turned out, was not “blown up” at all, but is still standing. Aerial photographs showed rocket shrapnel on the roofs of adjacent buildings. And then, later that night, Israel released an apparently undoctored recording of Hamas operatives more or less confirming the Israeli version of events. (The recording is in Arabic, but click here to hear it with English subtitles.) Even the Gazans themselves eventually pulled back from their initial inflammatory reports, no longer mentioning 500 dead but merely referring to unidentified “hundreds.”  But by then the damage was more than done. The Arab street was on fire. There were huge demonstrations in many Muslim capitals, including Istanbul, Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. President el-Sisi of Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled their plans to meet with President Biden, apparently thinking that insulting him for not embracing the initial (and almost fully incorrect) version of the story was a rational plan forward. On home turf, our own Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) asserted unambiguously (but apparently fully falsely) that the Israelis had “bombed the Baptist Hospital and killed 500 Palestinians.” And Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) shamelessly referenced the incident as an Israeli war crime without a shred of evidence to support her vitriol.

To wave this whole incident away as yet another success, albeit a temporary one, of the Palestinian misinformation campaign against Israel would be very wrong, however. The tragedy here is fully real. These poor people fled south in the first place to avoid being caught in the crossfire if Israel ultimately decides to enter Gaza to find and free the 199 hostages being held by Hamas. I suppose they must have imagined they were safe, or safer, in the southern part of Gaza and safer still in a hospital, a place of refuge and healing. If it turns out that this was “just” an accident, that the jihadists trying to murder innocent Israelis accidentally ended up murdering innocent Palestinians, then that will be terrible enough and grimly ironic. But if it turns out that this was intentional, that Hamas did this to prompt—almost to force—el-Sisi, Abdullah, and Mahmoud Abbas publicly to disrespect President Biden by refusing to meet with him in the course of his trip to the Middle East, then the raw cynicism of the move will be almost too much to bear.

I want to think that this was an accident. What normal person wouldn’t? But what if this was intentional, if this actually was undertaken fully intentionally as a piece of grotesque political theater intended to upend President Biden’s visit to the region? To refer to the concept of blowing up a hospital to further political aims as bestial behavior would be an insult to the animal kingdom. But some part of me wonders if that isn’t precisely what’s happened. And, indeed, President Biden’s trip to underscore our nation’s support for Israel and to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA—that may simply have been too clear a harbinger of a future featuring an alliance of leaders implacably opposed to the kind of barbarism for which Hamas stands for the Hamas leadership not to do whatever it was going to take to prevent from happening. And the fact that the Palestinian president was going to be included—for which invitation the price was surely going to be his willingness to join in a blanket condemnation of Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel and the unimaginable destruction directed almost solely against innocent civilians that incursion brought in its wake—that just may have been too much for Hamas to swallow. I have no evidence of any of the above. But I am too much a student of history to wave the darkness in my heart away as merely depressive or necessarily delusional. Terrible things happen in the world. And they often happen fully intentionally.

And that brings me to my real point. The challenge facing me personally in the wake of his incident is to find it in my heart to set everything I know about the Middle East—about Hamas and about the IDF and about Israel itself—to set it all aside and to mourn the dead of al-Ahli. I am by nature a bit cynical, but I specifically do not want to bring politics or cynicism to my appraisal of this tragedy, of this disaster. The children who died in the hospital was no more deserving of their fate than the Jewish babies and children murdered in cold blood by Hamas two weekends ago. So to wave them away as “mere” collateral damage in a larger story to which they were tiny footnotes—that would require a level of callousness and insensitivity of which I want—even need—to think of myself as being incapable of sustaining.

Since Simchat Torah, thousands have died on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border. To look past the death of innocents should be an impossibility for all who fear God and revere the sanctity of human life. Many more will die as Israel does what it can to eradicate Hamas and, in so doing, to avenge the death of its citizens. Still others will die as Hamas descends to ever darker degrees of demonic depravity in its anti-Israeli rage and does whatever it thinks necessary to hurt Israel and put space between it and its allies. In the end, Hamas will surely be annihilated. Of that, I harbor no doubts at all. But to take pleasure in that thought without mourning the innocents of al-Ahli should be impossible for even the most ardent supporter of Israel. As well it is with respect to me personally: I ardently look forward to the day when terror is defeated once and for all, but I mourn for those innocents who died when that rocket landed on the hospital in which they were seeking healing and refuge, and I feel their loss as a stone in my heart. To feel otherwise would be to deny their humanity—and that is something no decent person should even be able to do, let alone wish to do.