Bombing hospitals is a red line - unless Israel is doing it

Middle East Eye

5 hours ago

On Thursday morning, Iranian missiles struck Soroka hospital in Beersheba, triggering expressions of outrage from Israeli officials.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir likened the Iranian regime to 'Nazis who fire missiles at hospitals, the elderly and children'. President Isaac Herzog evoked imagery of a baby in intensive care and a doctor rushing between beds.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar declared on social media that 'only the scum of the earth fires missiles at hospitalized children and elderly people in their sick beds'. The chair of Israel's medical association, Zion Hagay, decried the strike as a war crime and urged the international medical community to condemn it.
This swift and unified condemnation by Israeli political and medical leadership underscores a striking contradiction: these same actors not only ignored but openly justified the destruction of Gaza's hospitals over the past two years.
Since 7 October 2023, Israeli air strikes and ground invasions have decimated Gaza's healthcare infrastructure. The World Health Organisation has recorded around 700 attacks on healthcare facilities. Major hospitals - al-Shifa, Nasser and the Indonesian hospital, among others - have been besieged, bombed and dismantled.
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Israeli officials frame these hospitals as military targets and Hamas 'shields'. Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, was placed under siege and then invaded, with the attack hailed by Israeli media as a victory.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Medical Association remained silent. In one of its rare statements after a year and a half of Israel's repeated and targeted attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, the association echoed the state's narrative, stating that health facilities and personnel must not be targeted 'unless these are being used as a base for terrorist activities'.
Selective moral outrage
What is especially striking about this moment is the selective moral outrage from Israeli officials. The same ministers who justified the systematic dismantling of Gaza's healthcare system now describe an attack on an Israeli hospital as a red line, a war crime.
Herzog's sentimental imagery of doctors rushing between beds evokes the stark reality in Gaza, where health workers have been shot and shelled in operating rooms, imprisoned, or forced to abandon their patients under fire.
International medical voices have played along. While many doctors and health workers have spoken out, many others have remained silent, with no real actions taken to hold Israel accountable.
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It would be a mistake to treat these official statements as being detached from the public mood in Israel. Most Israelis have defended the destruction of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure. Public discourse has normalised the idea that Palestinian hospitals are legitimate military targets, even celebrating their destruction in some cases.
This normalisation is not incidental. It is part of a broader dehumanisation of Palestinians, where even a child under anaesthesia in a Gaza operating room is not seen as a victim, but as collateral damage or a 'shield'.
The outrage over Soroka thus reveals a deeper truth: in the eyes of many institutions and audiences, some lives are inherently more valuable than others. When Israeli hospitals are struck, the world responds with empathy and urgency. When Palestinian hospitals are dismantled - patients killed in their beds, doctors arrested mid-surgery - the world hesitates, rationalises or remains silent.
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This is not simply a double standard; it reflects an entrenched hierarchy of whose suffering matters.
Israeli leaders speak today of moral lines, of civilians and children, of hospitals as sanctuaries. Yet for nearly two years, those very values have been systematically violated in Gaza, with hardly a whisper of regret. This situation reveals not only hypocrisy but also the cynical confidence that comes with impunity. It reflects how the boundaries of Israeli grief and outrage are drawn narrowly around Jewish Israeli lives, grounded in the certainty that Israel will face no consequences.
This moment puts the international system to the test. While some medical and humanitarian groups have expressed concern, most international stakeholders have remained silent in the face of the destruction of Gaza's entire health system.
Will medical journals, international associations and UN bodies respond to the attack on an Israeli hospital with the kind of swift condemnation and concrete actions they failed to take when hospitals in Gaza were bombed? The world should have acted when the first operating room was hit in Gaza. It should not take an Israeli facility being targeted for them to remember that hospitals are meant to be protected spaces.
If an attack on a hospital is a red line, this must be true for all hospitals, not just those serving Israelis. If international law is to mean anything, it must protect everyone, with the same standards applied to every violation. Anything less is not only hypocrisy; it is complicity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.