"A scene from Dante's Inferno"

A Norwegian doctor who's been working in Gaza describes the abattoir Israel has created:

DR. MADS GILBERT: The condition in Shifa Hospital and in the other hospitals in Gaza is horrifying. I’ve been to Gaza for the last ten years, in and out, teaching and training people in the medical field. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, all windows in the Shifa Hospital are out, due to the bombing of the mosque across the street. They have very unstable electricity. They lack supplies, disposables, surgical equipment, trolleys, beds even. They have a fantastic staff, who are working heroically to save their patients, but we have been doing surgery with, almost regularly, two patients in each OR, on the wall, on the floor, in the corridors. The lifts are barely working. The ICU had to triple its capacity with makeshift ICUs.

It is really, truly a scene from Dante’s Inferno. It is these loads of patients coming in. We had 120, 130 patients coming a day, children, women. And I would say approximately 90 percent—I repeat, 90 percent—of the killed and injured that we have seen are civilians. Up ’til yesterday, 971 people have been killed; of them, one of three is a child below eighteen. 4,500 injuries, as of yesterday at 4:00; among them, every second is a woman or a child. So this is really targeting civilian Palestinian population.

And I recently happened across this article in Ha'aretz:

Senior Hamas officials in Gaza are hiding out in a "bunker" built by Israel, intelligence officials suspect: Many are believed to be in the basements of the Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City, which was refurbished during Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip. [...]

During a cabinet meeting a week ago, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said senior Hamas officials found refuge in the hospital basement because they know Israel would not target it, due to the patients in the upper floors.

I have to wonder why this was leaked.  Are they trying to lay the groundwork for a move against Gaza's hospitals?  I'd like to think that actually bombing Shifa is beyond even the Israelis, though I'd never be foolish enough to overestimate them.  But one thing I know from my own experience is that the IDF will kidnap the wounded from hospitals—even going so far as to remove patients from live operating theaters.  I stayed overnight with other activists in Hebron's Al-Ahlia hospital in 2002 because the IDF had surrounded it with tanks the night before, searching for wounded Palestinians and abducting a doctor (who was taken away in a tank, ridden around Hebron, and finally released).  We slept uneasily on stretchers, stationed on various floors, ready to go at a moment's notice to do whatever we could—witness, if nothing else—should the Israelis come again in the night.

As we're seeing again in Gaza, helping the wounded is one of the quickest ways to become the next casualty.  One doctor we saw in Al-Ahlia was also a patient; he'd been shot in the side while trying to help two injured men in town, and was still delirious from the pain and medications.  We joined a funeral march for nine people who'd been killed in the previous day and met a paramedic who said three of the dead were his cousins, who'd been killed while trying to go out and help a man who'd been shot in front of their home.  An older man who'd lost two of his sons was there, crying and falling to the ground, and people were helping him to an ambulance.

Another man we saw in the hospital had been beaten down with rifle butts by Israeli soldiers.  His 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter ran away and was run over by an Israeli jeep, breaking her leg.  The man's brother had been shot in the head by the Israelis two years before.

That's just a small fraction of what I saw and heard.  Do you begin to get some idea of what it's like to be a Palestinian?  There wasn't a single person I met in the West Bank or Gaza who didn't have experiences just like this (going back decades), of beatings, humiliation, imprisonment, torture, shootings, family and friends killed and maimed by the Israelis.  Not one.  Can you imagine what it means to live an entire lifetime like this?

"A scene from Dante's Inferno" today in Gaza, but over the years Israel has played out the entire book.  And all of this—so many human lives disfigured and destroyed—for nothing more than its grasping territorial ambitions.

UPDATE: Oh good god:

In some of the most intense ground combat of the 20-day-old assault on Gaza, Israeli tanks powered into the southern suburb of Tel el Howa clashing with Palestinian militants firing rockets.

The tanks advanced under a barrage of artillery and mortar fire that struck the al Quds, al Fata and al Wafa hospitals.

There were unconfirmed reports that Shifa, Gaza City's biggest hospital, was on fire after being struck by Israeli shells.

Comments

Around 500 people were sheltering in the Al-Quds hospital in the city's southwestern Tal Al-Hawa district when it was bombed by Israeli jets and set ablaze on Thursday morning.

Hospital officials said the fire was sparked by a "phosphorus shell".

"We have been able to control the fire in the hospital but not in the administrative building," one hospital official said.

"We hope that the flames don't spread again to the wings of the hospital."

Two hospitals east of Gaza City were also hit by Israeli shells as Gazans fled tanks advancing into the city.

It was no immediately clear if any casualties following the raids.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/2009115153549143408.html

[Duncan]

That's a sweet little article from Ha'aretz. Intelligence officials suspect that Hamas leaders may be hiding out in a bunker under the hospital. As with the schools and the other civilian targets, eventually the Israelis will probably admit that they didn't suspect any such thing -- not that they thought so but were wrong, but that they knew they were lying. And apologists for Israel will go on repeating the lies to justify the atrocity.

[John Caruso]

Yeah. There's a lot of "suspecting" and "believing" going on, as in this PBS story: "WIDE ANGLE reached a doctor in Gaza who believes Hamas officials are hiding either in the basement or in a separate underground area." Odd how he can't say for sure, isn't it?

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if it's true, though, since Hamas guys have day jobs too (doctors, falafel vendors, lawyers, cab drivers, etc). Some of them probably work at Shifa—so when they report for their shift, are they committing a war crime?

And as always, it's worth asking how we'd respond if we heard about a Jewish hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto that hid members of the resistance from the Nazis. They'd be building a monument for them in Israel—not prattling on about "human shields".