How much longer will the civilised nations of Europe pretend that Israel's action in Gaza amount to self-defence?
The killing of Dr Marwan Sultan a leading cardiologist who ran the largest hospital in Gaza begs the question: what is Netanyahu trying to do?
The sheer numbers in war numb us to its horrors: monstrous casualty figures; staggering sums spent on weapons; square miles of a once-bustling city reduced to rubble. To grasp the true horror of war you need to be close to the ground, close enough to choke on the dust.
The amiable-looking man in my picture is a cardiologist. Or he was until earlier in the week. Dr Marwan Sultan, according to multiple reports, was killed along with a number of colleagues, by an Israeli air strike on one of the last remaining (barely) functioning hospitals in Gaza. Ninety-five percent have either been severely damaged or obliterated.
Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza, in the illusory belief that it can eliminate Hamas and its ideology, has taken a particularly heavy toll on community spaces, schools and hospitals - the last remaining refuges for civilians fleeing the shells.
Some reports, though these have yet to be independently confirmed, say the doctor was killed by a rocket aimed at his home in Gaza City. His wife and two other members of his family also died in the attack. Israel’s generals boast that they deliver death with surgical precision, to coin a phrase, so we must take them at their word.
The IDF insists that its “directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians”. But the evidence is mounting by the day that this, to say the least, is questionable. Israel’s leaders have thrown away the country’s vaunted moral compass in pursuit of a land without (another) people.
Sultan was director of the Indonesian hospital in the Gaza Strip. He is the 70th healthcare worker to be killed by Israeli attacks in the last 50 days, according to Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW), a Palestinian organisation that monitors what happens to medics.
The antisemitism ploy, the absurd assumption that we can’t hold two opposing thoughts in our head at the same time, does Israel no favours.
Sultan’s owlish face has been a constant presence on the news since the start of the war. He explains in a softspoken and restrained voice how he and his team work, often eating and sleeping, under fire treating the very sick.
Foreign doctors working under the same conditions voluntarily in Gaza tell the same story. Nick Maynard, a British surgeon volunteering at al-Aqsa hospital, spoke of “appalling injuries, mostly upon women and children”. Medics speak of “ 18th century conditions”: blocked toilets, filthy wards, virtually no anaesthetics.
Amputees being given paracetemol after surgery. They paint a picture of a health system slowly and systematically choked to death.
The last video by Sultan I can find is recorded in his office on October 19, 2024, the blinds drawn. He looks exhausted. It’s a moving but futile plea for help from the international community.
He says the hospital is under siege and his team don’t know how to get the generators that run life-support machines working. “Please help us” he says as Israeli soldiers roam the second and third floors of his hospital.
Imagine the courage and selflessness it takes to continue working in that hell when he could have decamped to Dubai or Harley Street or the Mayo Clinic in the US where his services, as a bi-lingual cardiologist, would command a king’s ransom.
The Indonesian Hospital, described by the World Health Organisation as the leading medical centre in Gaza, pretty much ceased operations after an Israeli airstrike destroyed its generators, as well as other vital infrastructure.
Al-Shifa hospital (it translates as healing or cure) was built with Indonesian money. (Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation). The hospital was vital to Gaza’s health and the well-being of its people. So was Dr Sultan.
The Israelis have consistently claimed that the hospital sat on top of underground tunnels built by Hamas to hide weapons, hostages and ‘a command centre’.
In November 2023, weeks after the Hamas massacre on October 7, the IDF cut off electricity, water and medical supplies. Patients on life support, including some babies, died according to both UNICEF and the UN.
They bombed ambulances in the hospital grounds. Why ambulances? One of them, the IDF said, was carrying Hamas ‘terrorists’.
Perhaps. But given the copper-bottomed video evidence of an unprovoked IDF ambush of five ambulances, a fire truck and a UN vehicle in March this year we can raise at least one eyebrow. Fifteen first responders died including eight members of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, five civil defence, and one UN agency employee. It was a massacre.
Six months after the first attack on Al-Shifa the IDF was back. Gunfights broke out in the hospital. The IDF claimed it was pursuing Hamas fighters. By April 1, 2024 the buildings were largely destroyed, mass graves were uncovered in the grounds, patient care was eliminated.
The UN, the EU and even the US National Security Adviser have demanded “ thorough and transparent” investigations into the mass graves found at Al-Shifa. But nobody is allowed into Gaza without IDF permission.
Al-Shifa serves as a brutal parody for this miserable war. It’s not a black and white story by any means. There is some independently corroborated evidence that a handful of Hamas gunmen operated from the complex.
But did this require its destruction by Israel’s elite forces?
Is there a rational explanation as to why the Israeli army has rained so much death and destruction on Gaza’s hospitals which are entitled under international law to ‘very special protection’? And schools? What is the purpose of these killings?
Israel’s says it’s because Hamas – which let’s face it is a death cult- is using civilians as human shields. There’s probably some truth to this.
But ask yourself what role do schools and hospitals play? They are hubs, places where the community gathers, places where a sense of togetherness is fostered. If you’re trying to destroy a people’s sense of identity then they’ll be high on your list of targets.
It would take a jurist to categorise what the IDF doing in Gaza as a war crime or genocide. To this man on the Clapham omnibus, it looks suspiciously like a deliberate effort to drive the entire population of Gaza into the wilderness. Ethnic cleansing. How easily these biblical metaphors trip of the tongue.
Benyamin Netanyahu seems hellbent on waging an endless war partly to save his own skin but also because he has a profoundly nihilistic view of the world. His contempt for Anyone-but-Jews in the region has led him and his country which was founded in 1948 on the principles of democracy, equality, respect for minorities and peaceful co-existence to a dark place.
A dismal aspect of Israel’s defence of its actions in Gaza, unfettered, unopposed, unchecked, is the old trope that anyone who criticises Israel is antisemitic. My Polish grandparents sheltered a Jewish toddler in wartime Krakow before sending her to Palestine via the Jewish underground. I was weaned on Israel’s right to exist.
The antisemitism ploy, the absurd assumption that we can’t hold two opposing thoughts in our head at the same time, does Israel no favours. Nor does the pipe dream that Israel will be safer by eliminating the Palestinians. Most egregious of all is the notion that the unfolding tragedy in Gaza has nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.
We live in a world where life or death for the oppressed, for now, hangs on the caprice of one man – Donald Trump. But pleasing Trump only becomes mandatory if we permit it. And in any case this tragedy will outlive Trump.
So here’s my question to Keir Starmer and the leaders of Europe: how much longer are we, who claim to be civilised, going to pretend that Israel is merely exercising its right of self- defence? And what are we going to do about it?
With you 100 per cent on all of this. Did you see that a group of Israeli pilots returning from a mission in Iran last month offered to drop their unused bombs on Gaza on their way back to base? Their offer was gleefully accepted and initiated a pattern that was repeated in the days that followed. This is genocide. There's no other word for it.
Sadly, I completely agree. Netanyahu is betraying everything good that Israel stood for. I can half understand that the Israeli population, which is subjected to a vitriolically biased media, largely supports him, but it is an utter disgrace that institutions such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, support him, and that our government and the BBC are actively suppressing reporting of the horrific barbarity of Israel's actions.