Kamal Adwan, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, has been under siege by the Israeli military, surrounded by tanks and repeatedly attacked for nearly three months.

This past week, Israel took this siege to even more barbaric levels. 

“We are being killed and slaughtered every day,” Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, Kamal Adwan Hospital’s director, said. On Thursday, December 26, an Israeli air strike on a building near the hospital killed some 50 people including five medical workers. 

The next day, December 27, Israeli troops stormed the hospital, set much of it on fire, and forced some 350 hospital staff, patients, and family members to evacuate the hospital at gunpoint. “The operating and surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned, and the fire is now spreading to the buildings,” Gaza’s Health Ministry reported.

Israel detained dozens of Kamal Adwan staff, including director Abu Safia, for interrogation—as if those who were trying to save lives were the criminals, not Israel’s military which was violently ending lives. Videos show a scene reminiscent of the crimes carried out by Nazis in World War 2—with Palestinian detainees stripped of much of their clothing being force-marched single-file past Israeli tanks, through mounds of rubble. At this writing, Israel is accusing hospital director Abu Safia of being a “Hamas operative,” and his family and colleagues say his whereabouts are unknown. 

Some of the 75 patients at the hospital were barely hanging onto life already: "There are patients who are threatened with death at any moment due to the harsh conditions," the Health Ministry stated. Israel dispatched ambulances to forcibly transfer 25 patients to the Indonesian Hospital—which was totally out of service (like all three hospitals in northern Gaza) after Israel destroyed its infrastructure.¹

"Concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system” = Genocide

Since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas,² in which more than 1,110 Israelis, many of them civilians, were killed, Israel has massacred at least 45,436 Palestinians in Gaza, including nearly 18,000 children, and wounded 108,038.³ Israel’s all-out assault has displaced over 2 million people—almost the entire population of Gaza—and deprived them of food, water, and shelter.   

AND Israel has destroyed the only means Palestinians had to try to save the injured or treat those ravaged by disease and famine—Gaza’s hospitals and healthcare system. 

In October, a United Nations commission issued a report that said Israel was carrying out a "concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities."

The World Health Organization said Israel’s “systematic dismantling” of Gaza’s health system is a “death sentence for tens of thousands of Palestinians.”

This is what deliberate, systematic genocide looks like. 

Double-Talk from White House and New York Times

When Biden’s spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Israel’s attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital, he declared that “Hospitals should not be active scenes of combat and conflict. People should be able… to feel safe going to a hospital, get the medical care that they desperately need.”

But he didn’t utter a word of criticism of Israel, much less condemn its murderous assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital. Instead, without offering any proof, he repeated Israeli claims that put the blame on (the now largely shattered) Hamas for using “civilian infrastructure.” Then, he refused to speak “to this particular strike” and referred the media to Israel’s military for an explanation.

Then think about how the New York Times framed one of its articles on Israel’s assault: “The hospital, Kamal Adwan, has been caught in the middle of Israel’s monthslong offensive against Hamas militants in northern Gaza.”

“Caught in the middle”?! As if Israel is on one side and Hamas on the other, and it’s an unfortunate “accident” (or the fault of Hamas) that Kamal Adwan Hospital was destroyed in the process. Bullshit: Kamal Adwan, its medical staff and the patients weren’t “caught in the middle.” The hospital and those in it were consciously and directly targeted by Israel as part of its genocidal campaign!

Stop Israel’s U.S.-Backed and -Enabled Genocide!

Kirby’s remarks and the New York Times’ coverage are but  two examples of the many ways the U.S. is backing—and enabling—Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza. The U.S. has armed Israel—over $22 billion in military aid in the last 14 months. It has provided other military support and intelligence. It has run political interference for Israel, whether vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN… aggressively clamping down on pro-Palestinian protests across U.S. campuses… or systematically covering up and lying about the fact that Israel is carrying out nothing short of an all-out and utterly one-sided onslaught of genocide in Gaza and that this is one of the most towering crimes by any power in recent memory.

The reality is that Israel could not be carrying out this campaign to literally destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza as a people, without the huge inflow of military financing and assistance, as well as diplomatic support, from the United States.

Those of us who live in this country have a responsibility to learn the full truth about and squarely face this reality, especially the U.S. role in it, to vocally and visibly build mass opposition to it, and to turn back the attempts by this system of capitalism-imperialism to vilify and crush this righteous resistance. 

For the Palestinian people and the people of the world, the hour is very late.