Wounded Palestinian children at the Al-Shifa hospital, following Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, October 17, 2023. Photo: AP
Israel justified its murderous siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza by claiming that it was really a military facility, with a Hamas command center and extensive tunnels underneath. Al-Shifa is no longer a focus of media attention, but Israel is still justifying its military onslaught by claiming it’s just going after Hamas—now in southern Gaza.
So what are the facts? It turns out that Israel knows all about the tunnels under Al-Shifa because they built them in the early 80s when they controlled Gaza.
During Israel’s criminal siege of Al-Shifa—as hundreds of patients were inside and thousands of civilians seeking shelter outside—TV news viewers in the U.S. were treated to repeated, daily coverage of a tunnel found under Al-Shifa leading to a blast proof door. This was treated as proof—or in any case strong evidence—that Hamas was operating a military command post from underneath the hospital. And the U.S. government backed up this claim with “intelligence” of its own.
November 3, 2023 Israeli airstrike outside Al-Shifa hospital killed and injured many Palestinians. Photo: AP
So what did the Israelis find when they finally opened the blast door? Nothing! ¡Nada! As journalist Jeremy Scahill said:
So, finally, then, last week, they blow the thing open. They go in there. And what do they find? They find three rooms, basically. One looks like a kind of very old-school, 1980s-style exam room from a hospital. There’s a sink somewhere in there. There’s two toilets. And then you have this utter clown from the IDF... running around, saying, “Aha! There’s electricity in here. This is a Hamas command center. Aha! They had an air conditioner in here.” You know, the pipes are rusty. Many of the electrical wires aren’t even connected. (Jeremy Scahill: Israel’s “Lethal Lie” About Al-Shifa Hospital as Hamas Base Was Co-Signed by Biden, Democracy Now!, November 28, 2023)
Again, where’s the U.S. media coverage of this revelation?! Where are their “corrections” to their reporting? Nowhere to be found!
As Bob Avakian has written about the media’s role in the Ukraine war—which could be equally said about Israel’s war in Gaza:
One of the most striking expressions of this is the way that this war, and the involvement of the U.S. in this war, has even more clearly revealed how the so-called “free press” in this country is nothing more than the propaganda instrument of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class. (THE FOG OF WAR, THE CLARITY OF WAR by Bob Avakian, revcom.us, April 1, 2022)
