No infrastructure remains in Northern Gaza for terrorism or for life

A patient evacuated from the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, on 27 December 2024

Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 29 December 2024:

The army invaded the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahia early Friday morning and ordered all of the patients and the medical staff to evacuate.

Dozens of frightened people, some of them barely able to stand, crowded into the hospital yard in the cold Gaza night; then the soldiers ordered them to undress and to begin marching, naked.  A video shows a trail of people, sunk in the sand, amidst the rubble; naked men with their arms raised, Israeli tanks surrounding them, as humiliated as it is possible for human beings to be humiliated.

They were left naked for hours in the nighttime cold of Gaza. Behind them were the dying and a few members of the medical staff who did not abandon them, about 25 people.

The Israeli military bombed the hospital; five members of the medical staff were killed. Fires broke out in the hospital’s laboratory and surgery department.  Some patients were sent to what remained of the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which the Israel Defense Forces had raided just three days earlier.

Dozens of people were seized from Kamal Adwan for interrogation, including the hospital director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, who was reportedly released Saturday.

Physicians in Gaza have died during interrogation and in prison. Ibrahim, the son of a doctor who did not abandon his patients, was killed a few months ago and is buried on the hospital grounds.

I wrote about Kamal Adwan Hospital, but the last time I visited it, in 2006, I described it as a “shabby clinic.” At the time, an old man who had been injured was rushed on a donkey cart to what looked more like a third world clinic than a hospital.

It’s very doubtful that the development work and civilian spending in Gaza during the years of Israel’s siege of the territory raised Kamal Adwan to the status of a hospital, but it is the last place left in the northern Gaza Strip to provide medical care to the surviving remnant of Palestinians who have not yet fled from the ethnic cleansing. How many of the patients will survive the nights to come? We will never know.

The IDF Spokesperson’s unit was quick to do its job and mask the crimes. The forces “began operating in the area of the Kamal Adwan Hospital following prior intelligence regarding the presence of terrorist infrastructure and operatives.”  No evidence of this was presented Saturday, and the fire that broke out in the hospital was also not the work of the army. The IDF burning hospitals? Inconceivable.

A preliminary investigation found “no connection” between military activity and the fire,” the army said. Perhaps lightning hit the surgery department, perhaps a patient’s cigarette ignited the fire.

In Gaza Thursday, the army killed five journalists who were inside a vehicle clearly marked “PRESS” and claimed they were “terrorists” and “combat propaganda operatives.”

Their “combat propaganda” was surely far inferior to the combat propaganda of almost all military correspondents in Israel, but had Hamas killed five Israeli reporters, the outcry would have reached the heavens.

The previous day, the IDF prevented the evacuation to a hospital of two women who were wounded in an attack on a house in the Tul Karm refugee camp, in the West Bank; they died. Apparently, Gaza is also in Tul Karm.

There’s no longer war in Gaza, only death and destruction meted out by one side, interrupted occasionally by the spasms of resistance. But when the goal is ethnic cleansing heading toward genocide, the work cannot stop for even a moment. The end justifies all means.

After 14 months of insane killing and destruction, no “terror infrastructure” remains in Kamal Adwan Hospital simply because no infrastructure remains, neither for terror nor for life, in northern Gaza.

These tales are meant to cleanse the ethnic cleansing that requires complete destruction so that no one can ever return to their homes, just as in the previous Nakba.

And let’s just suppose that among the beds of the dying patients in the hospital, five or maybe even six terrorists were hiding: In December 2024, Israel still thinks it is permitted to rampage to its heart’s content, as in October 2023. Even in hospitals.

This article has bee reproduced in its entirety