[Corporate media fail to report that Israels war on hospitals has
nothing to do with Hamas.]
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THE REAL REASON ISRAEL IS ATTACKING GAZA’S HOSPITALS  
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Arun Gupta
November 17, 2023
Life, the universe, and most things
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_ Corporate media fail to report that Israel's war on hospitals has
nothing to do with Hamas. _

Israeli forces Outside Al-Shifa’ Hospital, (screenshot: Al
Jazeera),

 

Israeli propaganda is bad, really bad, comically bad
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There are fake stories
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Hamas beheading babies, and even beheading a fetus
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There are outlandish claims
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“mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis –
women, grandmothers, children.” 

There is a fake Al Qaeda manual
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on a dead Hamas fighter emblazoned with “Al Qaeda” in English on
its cover. There’s a pristine copy of Hitler’s 
[[link removed]]_Mein Kampf
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child’s room of a Hamas “terrorism hub.”

There’s the Israeli video
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a fake nurse
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al-Shifa Hospital ranting about Hamas stealing morphine and fuel that
was seen more than 12 million times before being deleted. There’s
Israeli footage of a Hamas tunnel under a hospital that turned out to
be a Swedish Cold War-era bunker
[[link removed]]. 

There’s video of IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, the face of Israeli
propaganda, touring a fake Hamas bunker where he said hostages were
imprisoned under a children’s hospital. In the video Hagari points
to a schedule in Arabic posted to a wall where “every terrorist
writes his name
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to take turns guarding hostages. In reality, the paper was a shift
timetable
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dates and days and no names.

As laughably bad as the propaganda is, it gets worse. After besieging
hospitals in North Gaza for a week, Israel says it has proof that the
largest hospital, al-Shifa, was a Hamas command center. Its evidence?
An IDF video showing “about 10 guns
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That’s it  — 10 guns, some ammo, vests, uniforms. That’s all
the “evidence” the Israelis could muster in a sprawling 10-acre
complex
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six separate hospitals and medical facilities. Shifa is so large that
in October, 50,000 Gazans
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sheltering there from relentless Israeli bombing. 

That simple fact, 117,000 displaced Gazans
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Shifa and other hospitals in North Gaza, points to the real story. On
Oct. 13 Israel issued orders for hospitals in North Gaza to evacuate,
which the World Health Organization called a “death sentence
[[link removed](WHO,for%20the%20sick%20and%20injured.]”
for thousands of injured and sick patients. Amnesty International said
the orders amounted to “forced evacuation
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and would violate international humanitarian law. 

On Oct. 14, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights
warned
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“in the name of self-defense, Israel is seeking to justify what
would amount to ethnic cleansing.”

That is Israel’s main goal in its war on Gaza hospitals. It is
attacking places with the greatest protection under international law
to show no place is safe. Routing terrified refugees from shelter in
hospitals is necessary for Israel to ethnically cleanse the northern
half and perhaps the entirety of Gaza.

The Associated Press, which tends to toe the Israeli line, portrayed
the forced displacement
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humanitarian terms. Israel “urges mass evacuation,” it told
civilians “those who want to save their life, please go south,”
and said it would take “extensive efforts to avoid harming
civilians.”

The AP, New York Times
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News
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other outlets fail to use terms like “illegal,” “criminal,” or
“unlawful” to describe Israeli actions despite U.N. and
humanitarian organization condemnations of the siege, forced
displacement, and indiscriminate bombardment as war crimes. Virtually
no outlet connects the ethnic cleansing on the ground in Gaza to open
incitement for ethnic cleansing
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Israeli officials in the media. 

Western media subservience explains why Israeli propaganda is so lazy.
It doesn’t care. Israel knows corporate media will print its brazen
lies. Or if the propaganda really stretches credulity, like the fake
nurse or Swedish tunnels, the media won’t mention it. And Israel
knows the media won’t debunk its propaganda or explain there is a
well-documented history of Israel lying and being forced to retract
its falsehoods.

Apart from Democracy Now and Al-Jazeera, which provide far more honest
coverage of Israel’s war than the corporate media, there is an
absence of reporting that links Israel’s war on hospitals to how it
is conducting a new Nakba, ethnic cleansing, of Palestinians, more
savage than instances in 1948 and 1967. 

There appears to be only one report, from Reuters
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Oct. 13, that mentions Israel’s forced evacuation scheme to another
Nakba, though Reuters fails to use the term ethnic cleansing and the
report is in the context of Hamas leaders calling on Gazans not to
leave, implying they are the ones committing illegal acts.

The corporate media are a reeking mountain of maggot-infested shit,
unable to do their basic job of explaining what is happening in the
world: Israel is attacking hospitals because they are the last
significant obstacle to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and possibly to
genocide. 

Instead, the reports above regurgitate Israeli propaganda that Hamas
is preventing evacuees from fleeing, Hamas is using human shields,
Hamas is refusing Israeli supplies of fuel and aid for babies in
intensive care. 

It’s important to note that Israeli propaganda about Hamas using
hospitals for military purposes serves other ends as well. 

First, portraying hospitals as Hamas nerve centers justifies attacking
them. As I explained in my last article
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corporate media swallow the lie that Hamas uses human shields, which
makes all Palestinians legitimate targets. It doesn’t matter that
there is no evidence Hamas uses human shields. Merely saying it is
proof that reinforces the original lie.

Second, portraying Palestinian children as little Nazis dehumanizes
them. Crude Israeli government cartoons
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Palestinian babies filled with terrorism and violence and Israeli
babies filled with love and peace. No matter how many Palestinian
children Israel kills, officially more than 4,500
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of Nov. 10, they are “deserving of their suffering
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Third, proving Chomsky’s principle that “It’s all there in the
historical record,” the _Washington Post_ made the remarkable
admission
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Israel attacked al-Shifa Hospital to “pressure Hamas to reach a deal
on hostage releases.” This admits Israel is using hospitals as a
bargaining chip, talk of Hamas bunkers and weapons cache is a lie, and
the attacks on hospitals are then deliberate state terrorism and war
crimes.

Fourth, attacking hospitals means the Gaza Health Ministry can no
longer release daily death tolls as hospitals are a primary site to
collect data on those killed by Israel. The ministry stopped issuing
casualty updates
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Nov. 10 when the death toll had soared past 11,000
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The fact the ministry stopped issuing new death counts is added proof
that Biden was lying when he said he had “no confidence
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in the Palestinian death toll. If the ministry is just making up
numbers then why would it stop?

Corporate media are too servile to state power to say that, and too
cowardly to point out that preventing the health ministry from issuing
updated tolls is a propaganda boon for Israel. This is almost
certainly intentional on Israel’s part. No longer does it have to
contend with a growing outcry each day as the death toll grows ever
higher.

Fifth, attacking hospitals is a new Nakba. Israel is telling the world
it’s going to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It is doing it right now.
It’s happening in front of the entire world. But the corporate media
can’t see it. 

_ARUN GUPTA is an investigative reporter who has written for
the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, and The Washington
Post. He is author of the forthcoming, Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food
Loving Chef Explains How America Created the Most Revolutionary Food
System in History (The New Press), and leads food and history tours
around New York City. Email him at [email protected] with
questions, comments, or to join a food tour. Read all of Arun’s
writings [[link removed]] on politics, history, and
food at Substack. _

* Israel bombing
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* Gaza
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* hospitals
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