CCTV footage shows a dozen Israelis disguised as doctors, patients and other Palestinian civilians storming the hospital
Israel’s latest grisly escapade in Jenin Hospital encapsulates its descent into lawless barbarity. Brazenly disguised as medical staff, Israeli secret police executed three Palestinian fighters receiving treatment.
This breach of international codes banning violence against healthcare facilities demonstrates how the Zionist state now operates as a rogue military unfettered by civilized norms.
The chilling CCTV footage could be mistaken for some gangster film, yet the actors are Israel’s “elite” forces. Such extrajudicial assassinations were once the province of the Stern Gang or Irgun terrorists; now they are official state policy. Security pretexts ring hollow when gunmen storm hospitals hunting enemies too injured to fight back.
The Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces opened fire inside the wards of the Ibn Sina hospital in the city of Jenin. The Israeli military identified one of the Palestinians as a Hamas member. The second Palestinian killed was a member of the Hamas-allied Islamic Jihad and the third belonged to a group of Jenin-based militants, an Israeli military statement said.
“They executed the three men as they slept in the room. They executed them in cold blood by firing bullets directly into their heads inside the room where they were being treated,” Niji Nazzal, the hospital’s medical director, told Reuters.
Hospital sources told Reuters one of the men, Basel Ghazawi, had been paralysed when he was wounded by shrapnel during a clash between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in October, and was in a wheelchair.
The Palestinian health minister, Mai al-Kaila, described the incident as a war crime.
Israel’s military said one of the men, Mohammed Jalamneh was planning a terror attack in the “immediate future”. “For a long time, wanted suspects have been hiding in hospitals and using them as a base for planning terrorist activities and carrying out terror attacks,” said the Israeli statement. “This is another example of the cynical use of civilian areas and hospitals as shelters and human shields by terrorist organisations.”
This act will only intensify Palestinian rage and resolve. Far from enhancing security, it pushes reconciliation further away and makes renewed violence inevitable. Have we learned nothing from history? Brutal occupation breeds desperate resistance; no just peace can sprout from such bloody soil.
Yet the international community again responds with mealy-mouthed equivocation that emboldens Israeli aggression. Under endless indulgence, every line gets crossed. The fundamental principles of law lie trampled as excuses are found for each excess.
From its inception, Israel styled itself an enlightened Western outpost in barbarous lands. But its conduct over decades reveals instead a militarized Sparta deaf to moral pleas. In its zeal to crush all opposition, it has become the darkness it once fought against.
Who now represents civilization’s hope in this conflict? Justice is the only path to coexistence and Israel strays ever further from it. Any pretence of an honourable Zionism lies broken amidst demolished hospitals and mangled corpses. A nation ennobled by past suffering now inflicts equal torment.
Gaza’s destruction was not enough; even hospital beds offer no reprieve from bombardment. How long can the international community avert its gaze? Without courage to confront Israeli transgressions, we are all complicit in its crimes. Each new nadir probes how low humanity can fall when law is silenced.
This is an act of terrorism designed to terrorise
You have to consider Israel’s twisted logic that these killings enhance its security. It is claimed Hamas holds over 200 Israeli citizens hostage, a grievous outrage begging remedy. Insanely, Israel believes assassinating injured fighters advances this goal.
Would not capturing these already incapacitated wounded men for interrogation better serve their aim? What intelligence value flows from corpses? Only the terrorist mindset equates slaughter with strategy.
Clearly, Israel’s vaunted security services should first pursue every avenue to locate and retrieve their captured civilians. Bargaining, intelligence gathering, and diplomacy offer roads to resolution that midnight murders in hospitals do not.
Only negotiations in good faith, however distasteful to some, can end the cycle of violence gripping both peoples. This demands Israeli restraint and moral courage absent by far.
The shortcuts of brute force lead nowhere but deeper hatred and turmoil. Israel claims these killings thwart attacks, yet its own conduct does more to foster militancy. Slaying already incapacitated foes is not defense but vengeance.
If Israel’s mighty military apparatus cannot defeat Hamas through ethical means, the failure lies not in its arsenal but its leaders’ poverty of spirit. No civilized society should accept medic disguises and hospital assassinations as justified.
Without doubt, Israel’s captive citizens merit liberation, yet their anguish does not justify abandonment of morality itself. In its fury, Israel unleashes collective suffering on the Palestinians, leaving women and children butchered by the thousands. This is not counter-terrorism but terrorism.
Gaza’s smoldering wasteland exposes the bitter fruit of illegal occupation and disproportionate force. Israel’s conduct breaches every humane standard, edging toward the monstrous. This way lies not justice but the annihilation of Israel’s soul.
Embracing atrocity, even when cloaked as retaliation, relinquishes all claim to righteousness. No threatened state can forsake civilized restraints and retain virtue. Israel’s creeping cruelty risks making it the villain of its own history.
The well has been poisoned by decades of brutality and lies. Perhaps the damage is irreparable; the time for reconciliation lost forever. Yet what hope remains requires Israelis to confront themselves and their leaders with harsh truths. The oppressed have become oppressor, the abused now genocidal abuser.
This descent to barbarism shames the memory of Holocaust victims. The persecuted now drive others into the sea or bombard them amidst hospital beds. No equivocation can pardon such disregard for innocent life.
If any noble spirit yet stirs in the Israeli conscience, it must reject this bloody path before the point of no return. The abyss beckons, redemption recedes. Further atrocities will merely deepen the chasm. All who believe in justice must unite to pull Israel back from the brink.
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