Al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, where some of my injured family members were treated from IDF bombardment last year, has shut down today after staff stopped working and locked the facility down. Want to know why? Because the medical personnel were protesting against Hamas members taking over the Surgery Ward/Division and hiding there to protect themselves, endangering the entire facility.
The staff made the courageous decision, despite the immense need for medical surgeries, to stop operating the hospital and protect the facility, their patients, and their lives, to send a clear signal to Hamas and other terrorists: You have no place in a hospital, and you’re not welcome here. This heroic action is yet another step that’s part of a growing trend of small but growing local resistance to Hamas’s fascism and terrorism, which Palestinians in Gaza hold responsible for their complete annihilation in a useless war meant to prolong the rule of an Iranian militia in the coastal enclave.
This has happened time and again in medical facilities across Gaza, something that is illegal and immoral. And while I don’t want Israeli bombardment and targeting of hospitals anywhere in Gaza, international humanitarian law clearly states that the misuse of a hospital/medical facility to gain a military advantage or to shield military objectives from attack removes the protection for hospitals under IHL. In other words, Hamas’s thuggery, criminality, and terrorism give the Israeli government the excuse to target medical establishments in Gaza, something that, in turn, worsens the suffering of the civilian population in the coastal enclave.
Remember this whenever you hear or see people chanting for the “resistance.” Remember this when you see headlines that absolve the terror group of any responsibility for the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives and hope under the pretense of “fighting the occupation.”
By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, from the Realign for Palestine at the Atlantic Council