On medical equipment in Gaza - Clayton Dalton in The New Yorker:

‘On January 29th, two weeks after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, I crossed into Gaza as part of a twelve-person medical mission. After traversing southern Israel in a U.N. convoy, we followed an Israeli military escort through a maze of concrete barriers. Then we got out of our vehicles and lugged suitcases full of essentials—gauze, antibiotics, catheters, trauma shears—through a metal blast door. We passed a no man’s land of razor wire where, improbably, dandelions grew. Finally, we climbed into a van with a shattered windshield and drove to Khan Younis, a city of several hundred thousand in southern Gaza. Our driver swerved to avoid craters; almost every structure we passed was damaged. At one intersection, a minaret stood over a ruined mosque. Still, the city was alive. I saw a family drinking tea in a building with no roof.’

(…)

‘Our guide at Al-Aqsa was a burly thirty-five-year-old orthopedics resident named Mohammad Shaheen. He joked that the conflict had been great for his figure—he’d lost thirty kilos. He slid open the door of a cavernous metal shed that had served as a makeshift ward. “We built it in ten days,” he said. Now it was dark, with empty stretchers in the corners. “We are turning from trauma to reconstruction,” he told me. Countless Gazans needed medical care for past injuries and untreated medical conditions. Entire neighborhoods had to be cleared of rubble and unexploded ordnance.’

(…)

‘Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed. Hospitals have not been spared; most are no longer functional. A few weeks before my trip, the World Health Organization reported that more than a thousand health-care workers had been killed, and that it had verified six hundred and fifty-four strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities. The territory’s health sector was “being systematically dismantled,” a W.H.O. representative said. Just last month, Israeli soldiers were filmed opening fire on ambulances in southern Gaza, killing fifteen rescue workers. An I.D.F. spokesperson initially claimed that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals,” but the I.D.F. walked back that statement and opened an inquiry after footage published by the Times showed a uniformed medic next to motionless and clearly marked ambulances, followed by five minutes of gunfire from the I.D.F.’

(…)

‘We entered a large storage room in the corner of the I.C.U. which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound machines, I.V. pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had apparently been destroyed by a bullet—not in a pattern one would expect from random shooting but, rather, methodically. I was stunned. I couldn’t think of any possible military justification for destroying lifesaving equipment. When I asked the I.D.F. for comment, the spokesperson said, “Claims that the IDF deliberately targets medical equipment are unequivocally false.”’

(…)

‘Sidhwa said that one of his last patients that night was a sixteen-year-old boy named Ibrahim, who had sustained intestinal injuries from shrapnel. Sidhwa stitched up the boy’s rectum and created an ostomy—a hole that exits the abdomen—to allow his digestive tract to heal. Ibrahim had black hair and looked thin from malnutrition. He was expected to make a full recovery. The boy’s father seemed to know only two words in English—“thank you”—and kept repeating them. “It was sweet,” Sidhwa told me.
Five days later, Ibrahim was almost ready to be sent home. That afternoon, Sidhwa was on his way to check on him when a colleague flagged him down. As they were discussing a patient, an explosion rocked the hospital. Sidhwa’s Palestinian colleagues pulled him away from the windows; the building had been hit. The I.D.F later said that the strike had targeted a senior Hamas political leader named Ismail Barhoum. A spokesperson alleged that Barhoum was “in the hospital to commit acts of terrorism.” Sidhwa called this claim “fucking ridiculous.” Barhoum was related to Ibrahim, Sidhwa told me, so they received medical treatment in the same room. “He was wounded and he was here as a patient,” he said. “I’m telling you this as an eyewitness.” After the attack, Sidhwa again raced to the E.R. “We didn’t know if the Israelis were going to raid the hospital, or bomb it again,” he told me. Eventually, several men rushed in, carrying a teen-age boy in a bedsheet. They brought him into the trauma bay and set him down on a gurney. When Sidhwa drew the sheet back, he was shocked. The patient’s abdomen was shredded and his bowels were spilling out. It was Ibrahim, and he was dead.’

Read the article here.

As has been reported widely by Haaretz and probably other news organizations; some of the IDF units operating Gaza are rogue elements, making up rules on the spot. Which doesn’t mean that the politicians and the top brass are innocent.

The military advantage of killing more Hamas fighters is close to zero.

The fact that so many innocent civilians are allowed to die for the dead of one midlevel Hamas operative is a sign of the deterioration of Israeli society, deterioration according to Western standards.

Some would say that it’s the Western standards that are deteriorating, unfortunately.