Israel on the rampage in Gaza - and our media covers it up

Blowing up a cancer hospital, bombing another hospital. The normalisation of depravity will have severe consequences

Israel is on the rampage in Gaza, and the Western media are overwhelmingly covering it up. Joe Biden facilitated the first wave of genocidal carnage, which largely wiped Gaza from the face of the map.

Now, under Donald Trump, Israel is liquidating the Gaza ghetto.

This weekend, the IDF blew up the only cancer hospital in the strip.

The claim, of course, is that the Turkish Cancer hospital was a “Hamas compound”. This really takes “every accusation is a confession” to its most deranged level. You see, the IDF has been occupying this hospital and using it for military purposes for over a year.

The Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi has previously shared photos of Israeli soldiers gathered there and snipers stationed there, for example. Israeli soldiers also posted videos of themselves enjoying massage equipment meant for cancer patients, as well as destroying medical equipment for fun.

Why did Israeli soldiers blow up this cancer hospital? Not because it was a Hamas compound. They blew it up because they are committing genocide. They want Palestinians to die. In this case, they know they have imposed a death sentence on many cancer patients. They don’t care how Palestinians die, just as long as they die.

What other possible motive is there for destroying a cancer hospital which poses no military threat - itself an astonishing sentence to have to type?

You would think our Western media outlets could just state the facts about this hospital. After all, the facts are incontestable. The Israeli claims can be dismissed without any further interrogation. It was used by the Israeli state for military purposes, ergo it could not have been a Hamas base. I have struggled to find a Western media outlet to state these facts.

This wasn’t the only hospital attacked this weekend. The Israeli army attacked the emergency ward of Nasser hospital, too, with no warning.

What was the justification for bombing this hospital, whose victims include Palestinian medics and a 17 year old boy, who was supposed to be discharged today?

They say their target was a Hamas official, named Ismail Barhoum, who was killed in the strike.

A few things here. Under international law, attacking hospitals is strictly forbidden for reasons which hardly need explaining. The only exception is if the hospital has abdicated its civilian purposes by becoming used for military purposes - for example, launching missiles - and then any attack needs to be proportionate to any military advantage gained, and advance warning needs to be given.

In this case, the target was a political official - so not a military target. He wasn’t using the hospital for military means. He was a patient, he had been critically injured by a previous Israeli strike, and he was there being treated by doctors. I do not need to explain further that he represented no military threat of any description. There is no legal justification, none, for attacking that hospital.

As Feroze Sidhwa, a US surgeon serving at Nasser hospital who could easily have been killed, put it: Benjamin Netanyahu stands accused of genocide, and has recently been ill. “Nobody thinks Hamas can bomb a hospital just because Benjamin Netanyahu happens to go there,” says Sidhwa. “That’s crazy. This is completely insane. You don’t bomb hospitals - everybody knows what.”

Remember back in October 2023, when al-Shifa hospital - once Gaza’s main hospital - was hit by a missile and there was a massive controversy about who was responsible? The reason there was a massive controversy was because it was universally understood that attacking hospitals is a heinous crime.

Indeed, Mark Regev, at the beginning of the genocide, the then senior advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, stated: "Let me be clear, the IDF does not target hospitals."

Well, now al-Shifa hospital lies in ruins, and every hospital and medical facility in Gaza has been attacked, all repeatedly, with well over 1,000 Palestinians medics killed, and most hospitals and medical facilities rendered inoperable.

As a United Nations inquiry found last October:

Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.

No meaningful was presented to justify claims that these hospitals were military bases of any description.

Meanwhile, Morgan McMonagle, an Irish vascular surgeon volunteering with Medical Aid for Palestine in Nasser hospital, is quoted stating that the average age of children pronounced dead after last week’s wave of attacks was between 6 and 8 years old, and that over a third of casualties were under 14.

Let me say this bluntly and directly. In full view of the West, the world has normalised the destruction of hospitals, the slaughtering of medical staff, the butchering of tens of thousands of children and babies and so many other innocent people, the deliberate starvation of an entire people, torture, rape - and endless other atrocities and acts of depravity.

For the West, this is the sowing. The coming harvest will be bitter.

Once normalised, this depravity spreads like a disease. It has after all become acceptable, not even provoking a raised eyebrow from Western political and media elites. With no stigma or consequences, what is to stop this depravity being unleashed elsewhere?

And with the depravity of the West flaunted for the world to see, with so many on a daily basis witnessing the limitless barbarism being facilitated by the West, it would be desperately naive to think we will not suffer a hideous reckoning.

On Israeli television, they continue to broadcast their incessant genocidal intent. In a televised discussion, Colonel Gabi Siboni from the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security is quoted stating:

Hamas is not the problem in Gaza... The population in Gaza is barbaric riffraff... The only solution is Trump's vision.

Describing an entire population as “barbaric riffraff” - well, that is straightforward genocidal incitement. And describing anyone else as “barbaric riffraff” when you support a genocidal onslaught unleashed by your state which is blowing up hospitals, murdering medics, butchering countless thousands of children and babies, deliberately starving an entire people - as you advocate forcibly removing an entire people from their land?

The inability of those afflicted by genocidal mania to see themselves for what they are repeats itself throughout history.

Last week one Israeli cheerleader tweeted the following:

There are no civilians in Gaza. Hamas has drafted everyone, down to the newest babies, into the war effort, and they rejoice when the children they shove into the line of fire die because it's their most powerful weapon against those they hate more than life and blood.

And as another twitter user perceptively responded:

everyone who has ever committed, abetted or supported genocide thinks they’ve stumbled upon the exception to humanity, that they alone have found the people-who-aren’t-people, that those they kill are more dangerous than their killers. it’s inherent to genocide to think like this

That’s exactly it. The genocidal mania possessing Israeli society is not unique. All genocides are justified by a view that this particular people poses an existential threat, that this particular people have collective guilt, that this particular people are the exception for which you must dull any remorse or empathy.

This is a hideous lesson for all of us about how the great evils we are familiar with in the past were made possible. And it must be restated. If we do not succeed in establishing that Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is an intolerable crime, if we do not succeed in holding those who facilitated this genocide to account, then it is not just the Palestinian people who face physical ruin. We will have paved the way to hell for our species as a whole.