Can Israel justify raiding a hospital?

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. This week, Israel’s military raided Gaza’s main hospital, claiming Hamas was using the facility as a command post. But given hospitals are supposed to be protected by international law, can Israel’s actions be justified or did it commit a war crime? Today, former Middle East correspondent Ben Knight unpacks a week where the Al-Shifa hospital became a flashpoint in the war.

Ben, since the very start of this war, hospitals in Gaza have been a flashpoint, particularly Gaza City’s largest hospital, the Al-Shifa hospital. Tell me about that hospital first of all, because you’ve been there when you were a Middle East correspondent.

Ben Knight: Yeah, a long time ago, and not for very long. But what I remember is probably exactly what you would expect. It’s the main hospital in Gaza. It covers a large area of land. It dominates the skyline. Many people decided that the hospital was the safest place to be, because they figured it was something that would not be targeted, or at least not as randomly targeted as, say, the apartment buildings.

Sam Hawley: So yeah, a lot of people taking shelter in there in a quite sprawling hospital. And even before the Israeli army raided the hospital, from all accounts, the situation inside was absolutely dire.

Doctor at Al-Shifa hospital:  The situation at Shifa hospital is very horrible. We are overwhelmed with the huge number of injured people, especially at the emergency department and even at the ICU department.

Doctor at Al-Shifa hospital: Can you hear the screams from Shifa hospital? When are you going to stop this? You’re all complicit.

Ben Knight: The World Health Organisation was saying that Al-Shifa could no longer function as a hospital because it didn’t have the electricity, the fuel and the water, all of which of course is is controlled from outside. And so you saw those images of three dozen premature babies bundled together to keep warm because the incubators weren’t working. And the director of the hospital, Dr. Mohammaed Abu Salmiya, said they were forced to bury dozens of bodies in this mass grave in the complex. Equally concerning or distressing that doctors had performed surgeries without anaesthesia and without oxygen, and you would imagine that any kind of medical supply is just about impossible to get.

Sam Hawley: So early this week, Israeli troops were surrounding the hospital and the IDF began trying to show the world that Hamas had stored weapons and run command centres in the tunnels beneath the hospitals in Gaza. It was a real campaign by the IDF, wasn’t it?

Ben Knight: The IDF launched a campaign to show this crucial point that Hamas was using hospitals as cover, and that Hamas fighters were using patients and doctors as shields. Now there were two videos that were released.

IDF Video: This is Rantisi Hospital and this is the place where I showed you the tunnel. I want you to see.

Ben Knight: Now, neither of those being from Al-Shifa, but the Israeli Defence Force is trying to press the case that this is how Hamas operates. And so you saw the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, he walked viewers through what he says was military equipment found in a basement of another hospital. This is the Rantisi hospital and where he says hostages were held.

IDF Video: You’re now entering into the room where we suspect the hostages were being held. I want you to understand this kind of gear is a gear for a major fight. People shooting RPGs from hospitals. This is Hamas firing.

Sam Hawley: So Ben, Israel was trying to show these hospitals were used as command centres, were used by Hamas. And shortly after those videos were released very early on Wednesday morning, that’s when the troops went in to the Al-Shifa hospital. So what happened then?

Ben Knight: Well, details from this raid are sketchy. They’re impossible to verify from outside. We can’t verify what went on, but officials from the two sides have presented, not surprisingly, two different accounts. Now, the Israeli Defence Force says it launched a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area of the hospital, that the aim of the raid was not to harm civilians and that the force went into the hospital with medical teams, with Arabic speakers, transferring incubators, medical equipment and baby food. Now, the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza put out its own statement. It said the Israeli soldiers had beaten patients and others had been expelled from the complex. So those are the official statements.

Sam Hawley: So, Ben, what do the Israeli soldiers say they found in the hospital at Al-Shifa?

Ben Knight: Well, now, as we record this now, there’s no smoking gun. There is an Israeli army video released on Wednesday showing automatic weapons, grenades, ammunition, flak jackets which it said were recovered from a building within the complex.

IDF Video: And what we have found, I think, is only the tip of the iceberg. I’ll show you what our troops exposed just minutes ago. In military terms, this is a grab bag. There is an AK 47. There are cartridges, ammo. There are grenades in here, of course, uniform.

Ben Knight: There was no mention, again at the time that we recorded this, of the Israeli army finding any tunnel entrances at Al-Shifa. And Hamas, for its part, says the weapons were planted. It hasn’t built any tunnels under the hospital and wants a committee, including the United Nations, to what it says, “verify the lies of the occupation”.

Sam Hawley: Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unapologetic about the army’s actions.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister: They said that we would not reach the outskirts of Gaza City. We’ve arrived. They told us that we would not enter Shifa. We’ve entered and in this spirit, we say a simple thing there is no place in Gaza that we will not reach.

Sam Hawley: And the US president, Joe Biden. He was asked whether the Israeli operation in the hospital was justified.

Joe Biden, US President: The first war crime is being committed by Hamas, by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened.

Sam Hawley: So Hamas denies using hospitals for cover, but Israel and the US say it does. And the US national security spokesman, John Kirby, says that is in itself a war crime. What does international law then say about all of this?

Ben Knight: Well, it is, of course, a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law that the wounded and the sick shall be collected and shall be cared for, and any violation of that is a grave breach and is a war crime. But hospitals can lose that protection if Hamas use them to hide fighters or store weapons. Which of course is exactly what Israel says Hamas is doing. But international law also says there must be plenty of warning before the attacks to allow the safe evacuation of patients and medical workers. Listeners, I’m sure, will recall that Israel gave quite a bit of notice to people in the north of Gaza saying, get out, move south. But the onus is on the attacker, in this case, Israel, to demonstrate why that protective status of the of the hospital should be lost. It has to prove that terrorists were operating in the hospital, and if harm to civilians in a hospital from such an attack is disproportionate to the military objective, that is also illegal under international law.

Sam Hawley: Right. So Israel needs to prove that it had a legitimate reason for raiding the hospital. And it’s released these videos, I suppose, to try and show that Hamas is using the hospitals. But how do we actually verify any of this? How do we know that that’s true?

Sam Hawley: You can’t independently verify what these claims are. So you had the UN, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, they are extremely critical of this. They call this a violation of international law. You’ve got the World Health Organisation’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying that the incursion into the hospital is totally unacceptable. He says hospitals aren’t battlegrounds.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general: Under international humanitarian law, health facilities, health workers, ambulances and patients must be safeguarded and protected against all acts of war.

Ben Knight: At a press conference in Beirut, a Hamas spokesman said the Israeli military’s presentation was a lie and a charade. But the United States, as you’ve mentioned, says it has intelligence which has been gathered from American-generated sources that supports Israel’s allegation that Hamas has been operating out of hospitals.

Sam Hawley: Okay, so Ben, the Al-Shifa hospital, it has become a focal point of the war. This is the type of thing that sways hearts and minds, isn’t it? The image of premature babies out of incubators. I mean, that will become an iconic image of this war, I would have thought.

Ben Knight: Oh no question. Just as much as those images of paragliders flying into the music festival and some of those horrific images of the kidnap, the torture, the abuse, in some cases the execution of of Israeli civilians in which some of us can never unsee. It’s a very interesting moment for Israel. Israel has long had the sort of almost reflexive, bipartisan, solid support, particularly in the West from the United States, but also in Australia and the UK – in the Anglosphere, if you like – which has been really, really important. It struck me that, you know, at the time that I made my first visit to Gaza, there were young children who I saw there, and that some of those young children, you know, may well have been those grown up young male terrorists who breached through the fence and committed those atrocities at the music festival in the kibbutzes and elsewhere, and that those kids have only known Gaza as a place that was locked off from the outside world, that occasionally bursts into hot war with, you know, explosives going off with people that they know being killed. And it was something you could actually see in their eyes at times. There was just something – just an edge. And I think because that’s been going on for so long, there’s similarly could be a generation outside of Israel that has only known Israel essentially as the occupy in the West Bank. And the way that it is operating there has been operating there, particularly in relation to expanding settlements, which are also illegal under international law. And so if you have a generation that has only seen that and doesn’t have a memory of Israel when it was at its most vulnerable and had its greatest need to defend itself from terror attacks, then I think it’s probably the biggest test of its standing, particularly in the Western world, that I can remember.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, and just back to the hospital flashpoint. People are seeing this around the world. It’s confusing. It’s confronting. So where does that leave Israel in the global public mind?

Ben Knight: I think this hospital incursion, this hospital raid, and the claims that were made about it and the and the damage that’s been done there, is a test. Israel has made some big claims about what is there, has acted accordingly based on those claims to be on the right side of international law. We’ll see what turns up.

Sam Hawley: Ben Knight is a former Middle East correspondent for the ABC. If you want to hear more about the Israel-Gaza conflict and whether Israel’s response is proportionate, we covered that on Monday. Look for: Has Israel gone too far? That’s in your feed. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald, Anna John and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.