Dry your tears for Nasser Hospital

OPINION:

On Monday, acting on good intelligence that there was an imminent threat in the complex, the Israel Defense Forces struck Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip. Though it’s still unclear how many people were killed (Palestinian media, notoriously prone to lying, almost immediately gave the number as 20), there were casualties, including several journalists.

The outcry from Europe was pretty much instantaneous, as it always is. Spain called the move “a flagrant and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law,” and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, on X, proclaimed himself “horrified” at the action.

What’s new? Absolutely nothing. This is how it goes whenever Jews have the temerity to survive a genocidal rampage that was intended to wipe them from the face of the earth and then get proactive about staying alive. The latest such attack was on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in Israel. For the past 22 months, Israel has fought back, daring to sustain itself, its people and a remarkably vibrant economy in what amounts to the worst neighborhood on the planet.

Every time Israel has eliminated a threat in Gaza, the political left has lost its collective mind. In fact, the stock, push-button response of the so-called civilized world might be — and probably is, if we’re paying close enough attention — exactly the same after each such occurrence.

It’s a bit like the old joke summarizing every Jewish holiday: “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”

Except this isn’t funny.

Here’s the truth about the hospital strike and others almost exactly like it: The place is a known terrorist operations center.

“We are operating in an extremely complex reality,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, an IDF spokesperson, said in a statement Monday. “Hamas terrorists deliberately use civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, as shields. They have even operated from the Nasser hospital itself.”

According to Israel National News, “a camera had been placed on the hospital roof to film Israeli forces and was being used by Hamas,” and Israel’s military made the decision to remove it. As for some of the dead from those strikes being journalists, there was perhaps a time when that title conferred true impartiality. But no more, and not for a long time. In fact, ‘journalists’ from Al-Jazeera, the Associated Press and other outlets with offices in Palestinian areas have been found to be affiliated with Hamas. Some have even been discovered to have been involved in the Oct. 7 massacres and/or in the taking and abuse of Israeli hostages. Ditto for the doctors working at other medical buildings struck by Israel’s military. So much for “First do no harm.”

Are the deaths of these people at Nasser Hospital sad? Certainly. Yet unlike Hamas, which has every intention of killing Israelis and Jews wherever and whenever it can, Israel didn’t intend to kill them, and it wouldn’t have targeted the hospital in the first place if terrorists hadn’t been using it to advance the “global jihad” against the Jewish state.

In fact, Israel’s armed forces could probably be much further along in their quest to stamp out Hamas if they weren’t so totally committed to avoiding civilian injury and death at every turn. That’s remarkable, especially considering that the vast majority of the people they are trying to keep from killing voted for Hamas to “govern” them and agree with the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

In its bid to keep from being “pushed into the sea,” as terrorist Yasser Arafat vowed to do, Israel is likely to hit more civilian infrastructure in Gaza. When it does, the Jew-hating left the world over will clutch its pearls. Here’s hoping the rest of us will have the sense to see what’s really going on.

• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor of The Washington Times.