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Can we merge Israel-Gaza related posts with the main thread now? The last one is 10 days old. At this point, +200 posts in the main thread should not crowd out other topics.
Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza has gotten a lot of attention lately. The brief siege already has a Wikipedia page longer than the First Battle of Fallujah's. It doesn't yet beat the Second Battle of Fallujah's page word count. Yet. There has been plenty of standard internet hemming and hawing, propaganda wars, and some genuine interest with the ethics civilians stuck in the middle of a war. In case you were worried, the premature babies are safe.
The IDF, which has made public claims that the hospital is used as a headquarters for Hamas operations, released a couple segments of footage since successfully occupying the hospital. One is a video with footage of a tunnel that leads to a blast door around, if not under, the hospital. The second video is allegedly from the hospital's security cameras footage on the 7th of October. One person in the footage is an amputee wheeled in on a gurney; the other hustles on his own two feet, herded by armed men although he could be injured still.
Israel is releasing this footage to try to show the hospital was an active part of Hamas operations. Critics retort well, duh, hospitals are where you take injured
hostagespeople, you baby killers. Critics of those critics say, well how come come they didn't just drop off these hostages at one of the other 6 hospitals on the way back from the border, Mr. Smarty Pants Real Baby Killer? If we get something like the truth eventually, then the wrong baby killers will memory hole it, while the right baby killers will throw it in their face. The war wages on.Within this context, there's questions about the complicity of doctors and NGO's involved in Gaza. People like this guy and other former doctors have denied that there is any Hamas activity in the hospital. The vibe is that NGO's deny their proximity to Hamas in Gaza, and thus are complicit to some degree. This is just some guy but it's a common type of thread.
My question is more general: if you were a doctor in Gaza, and you knew Hamas operated within your hospital, what is the right thing to do? If you alert the Israelis to the presence of their enemy in your building, there is a good chance you are adding yourself, your hospital, and your patients to a target list somewhere. So, aren't you just putting everyone at risk by ratting out Hamas? Does the degree of the operation matter? Say, if Hamas only showed up once every couple of weeks to get medical attention, standard guard, and bring some hostages for treatment every few years, would you trust the IDF to take that into account when determining what kind of response was appropriate? You know Israel is mad, but they probably won't drop a JDAM onto a hospital and say oops, right? But, if you thought they might do that, and Hamas was operating deep in some tunnel system underground, shouldn't you let the IDF know that so they don't just drop a JDAM on the roof?
In this not-so-but-maybe hypothetical, I can't see a good reason why you'd ever talk to the IDF about Hamas being around you. In fact, you might even think it better to deny it and hope the fighters just evacuate before you and your patients get blown to bits. When the IDF shows up to siege you, you try to negotiate the evacuation of the premature babies, but otherwise you keep your mouth shut. When asked, you say you are there to provide medical attention to anyone that walks through the door, but are not responsible for whatever else goes on there. If you talk about Hamas after the fact, then you may get kicked out of the territory and that's just one less doctor around to provide medical treatment. Gun to head, if they find a Vietcong command center under your feet you stick to that story, so you can continue to provide medical treatment to people who need it, at a time when they need it most. This makes you complicit to a degree, but also seems ethical enough for me. What do you guys think?
I don't feel good about it, but I can't say I disagree. Like @Rov_Scam said, the medical staff is there to provide medical care first and foremost and you probably don't have the capability to make Hamas go away. This situation isn't too much different that what Doctors Without Borders or other medical NGOs face in a dozen different geographic locations wherever there's an ongoing civil war or armed insurrection. There's almost no way you're only treating innocent civilians without providing medical care to guerillas too.
Yes after making the post I realized we could just be discussing how bad it is to indirectly assist a group like Hamas by simply being present and providing aid. How culpable are these NGOs for providing more "human shield" cover, propping up governance, in order to heal people in need? Not culpable enough to say no more treatment there ever. Journalists would have a harder time convincing me they are doing good by embedding with Boko Haram to cover their atrocities. In that case, I do think coverage is better than no coverage, but doctors in general have a much stronger claim to do gooder status. Even if their involvement is used to the advantage of bad actors.
I do think they probably shouldn't be running cover for Hamas. They don't need to act as spies, but neither do they need to act as propagandists.** The latter is not proven by my post.
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