Why the world cannot trust Israel regarding Gaza hospital bombing

On Tuesday evening, an Israeli airstrike struck the main compound of Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing 500 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, says Palestinian Health Ministry in the besieged enclave.

The Christian charity-run hospital not only nursed hundreds of people who’d sustained serious injuries in the week-long bombing spree of Israel but also hosted dozens of civilians displaced by relentless airstrikes.

Since the deadly attack which accounts for war crime, Israel has pushed out different versions of what might have happened. Initially, the Israeli military said that Palestinian fighters fired rockets using the hospital as a cover and the Israeli missile could have inadvertently hit the hospital. Now, the narrative has been spun and the blame pinned on the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Israel accused PIJ of misfiring a rocket from a cemetery near the hospital and hitting the hospital.

But experts and human rights organisations have in the past investigated similar Israeli claims and found them to be untrue, even debunking theories such as Hamas and PIJ use civilians as human shields.

Tel Aviv has deployed disproportionate fire power against Palestinian fighters who rely on small firearms and home-made rockets to target Israelis.

“In a situation like this even if we trust the Israeli side, even if you say okay you were right there were a few combatants in the hospital and firing rockets, you killed 500 people, 500 innocents,” says Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at the Queen Mary University of London.

“The principle of proportionality says you cannot do that.”

Israel has repeatedly used the civilian-human-shield argument to unleash its US-backed airpower on Gaza where even basic necessities have to be smuggled in because of the Israeli blockade, which has affected more than 2 million people for 17 years.

Israel's war Gaza in May 2021, in which 260 Palestinians, 66 children among them, were killed saw similar attempts by Tel Aviv to put the blame on Hamas and other groups for the high civilian casualties.

During the humanitarian crisis that’s unfolding in Gaza, the international community is often forced to believe in the version fed by Israel since it strictly controls access of independent investigators and humanitarian workers to the coastal region that Palestinians want to include in a future state of their own.

On May 16, 2021, the Israeli military struck Gaza City’s Al Wahda Street, destroying several buildings and killing 44 civilians.

Israel was quick to claim that it was targeting an underground tunnel and a Hamas command centre. But a subsequent Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation didn’t find any evidence to support that allegation.

“The Israeli military has presented no information that would demonstrate the existence of tunnels or an underground command centre in this vicinity, and has not shown that the anticipated military gain from the attacks exceeded the expected harm to civilians and civilian property,” the HRW wrote in a report at the time.

This wasn’t the first time Israel had made such claims.

After the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, an Amnesty International investigation wasn’t able to verify the Israeli claim that civilian buildings including schools were being used by armed groups as launchpads for mortar and rocket attacks.

For instance, Israeli forces completely destroyed Al Wafa hospital in Shuja’iyyeh claiming that it was used as a rocket-launching site. But Amnesty says it wasn’t able to find evidence that would corroborate Israeli assertion.

Using the human shield argument, Israel has in the past bombed infrastructure such as Gaza’s only power plant to inflict collective punishment on Palestinians.

“The argument of the human shield is well known and has been used a lot both in Israel and in Sri Lanka and in other places to basically justify the killing of civilians. So you frame them as human shields but a rocket was fired near the hospital does not mean that the hospital and everyone in it was a human shield,” says Gordon.

What Israel did is a “war crime,” he says.