Gaza’s health ministry and UNRWA: Attacks on Hamas fighters in the past, with more deaths and injuries due to airstrikes
But as Hamas rocket attacks continue, and artillery shelling and small-arms fire intensifies within the territory, determining the source of the damage detected by satellite imagery becomes increasingly difficult.
According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, Israel’s military has launched almost continuous airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, causing the death of at least 10,000 Palestinians.
At least 52 mosques and seven churches have been damaged in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict, according to the Health Ministry. UNRWA says 50 of its installations in Gaza have also been hit with airstrikes or bombs, resulting in the deaths of at least 66 displaced people on their properties and hundreds injured.
Van Den Hoek, a satellite imagery and remote sensor expert, said that it’s been increasing for a long time. There’s broad damage in areas where people live.
The narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt is known as the Gaza Strip. Its footprint is roughly equal to that of the city of Philadelphia, but with a half million more people, many packed into concrete high-rises in tight cities up and down the coast.
It is not known how many residents remain in the northern half of the Gaza Strip. In northern Gaza, the U.N. aid agency UNRWA provides shelter to over 160,000 people who have fled their homes. They think that 117,000 people have been moved to hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza. The World Health Organization said on Oct. 29 that “evacuation of hospitals is impossible without endangering patients’ lives.”
The Israeli military has denied targeting Gaza’s hospitals. Despite this, Israeli airstrikes on or near hospitals in the northern half of Gaza continue, according to witnesses and international aid groups.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 45 people were killed when bombs fell on Al-Maghazi refugee camp. The Israeli military said Sunday that it was looking into whether or not it was active in the area at that time. The Associated Press reports that 13 are dead after Israeli strikes near a refugee camp.
The second episode was Nov. 3, when Israel acknowledged an airstrike just outside Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital the Gaza Strip. Israel said it targeted an ambulance that Hamas fighters were using as cover to get away from the hospital in Gaza City. Hospital officials said there were 13 people killed and dozens more injured, but Hamas denied that.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 provide special protection, saying “civilian hospitals … may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict.”
Hamas denies the Israeli allegation that it has headquarters under Shifa Hospital. The group acknowledges building a vast tunnel network, and is widely thought to be operating in and around sensitive civilian sites.
For Hamas, this is a “win-win strategy,” said Pnina Sharvit Baruch, a lawyer who served in Israel’s army as a top legal adviser on military operations.
“Either Israel refrains from attacking this [Hamas] military infrastructure because civilians might get killed. Or Israel does attack. “When people get killed in Israel, there is pressure on the country from around the world,” said Sharvit Baruch with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military has been using weapons in densely populated city blocks, causing tremendous civilian harm. That’s predictable,” Bashi said.
Israeli Lawyers for the Defense of Israel: The Shifa Hospital Attack and the Israel-Israel War on Adversarial Activities in the Gaza Strip
This shield is not absolute. If an armed group uses the hospital to carry out activities that are harmful to the enemy, it can lose this protected status.
Any future actions would have to be proportional. A lone gunman firing from a hospital wouldn’t give an army the right to destroy the entire building, according to lawyers.
During times of relative calm, the former Israeli lawyer spent her years working with commanders to build target lists.
The first was an Oct. 17 explosion in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. The Palestinians said hundreds were killed by an Israeli airstrike. Israel said that it was a rocket fired by the Palestinians. U.S. and other intelligence agencies also investigated, and said the evidence pointed to a Palestinian rocket.
At least some of the casualties were among the thousands of Palestinians who are camping out on the grounds of Shifa and other hospitals, hoping they will provide at least a bit more safety than other places in Gaza, a territory under almost round-the-clock bombardment.
Bashi said Human Rights Watch is looking into the attack on ShiFA hospital, noting that Israel said the Hamas fighters were not attacking from it. She also said that Israel gave no warning it was striking.
“These are the kinds of rules that all the nations in the world have agreed to,” she said. The Israeli military is not accepting the rules.
There have been scores of suicide bombings in the 1990’s and early 2000s by Hamas, as well as a massacre in southern Israel.
The group holds about 240 hostages, most of them civilians, and during the past month, has fired thousands of rockets in ongoing attacks directed at civilians in Israeli cities.