A textbook war crime in Jenin
Israeli forces shot patients in their hospital beds, claiming they were enemy combatants. That is exactly the atrocity the Geneva Conventions were written to stop.
Israeli troops infiltrated a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin and shot dead three Palestinian patients, who were wounded members of rebel groups, on Tuesday. Security camera footage shows the Israeli gunmen entering dressed as doctors. The Palestinian health ministry claimed the victims were shot while sleeping. Local journalist Shatha Hanaysha photographed a bloodied hospital bed and reported that one of the victims had been partially paralyzed when the troops shot him.
No one disputes the basic facts. Israel admitted to the raid, and Hamas admitted that the three victims were members of the Jenin Brigade, a local umbrella coalition of Palestinian rebels. The Israeli military argued that, because the victims were “terrorists,” they were guilty of “hiding in hospitals” and using other patients as “human shields.”
The laws of war clearly protect injured fighters’ right to medical care. It doesn’t matter who the victims were; anyone lying wounded is not a legitimate target. Leaving bloodied bullet holes in hospital beds is the worst sort of war crime, the fundamental atrocity the law of war were written to prevent. Dressing up an Israeli hit squad as doctors is another war crime by itself, exactly the type of perfidy Israel accuses its enemies of.
The modern laws of war were first written in order to protect injured soldiers, not civilians. Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant founded the Red Cross and began pushing for written laws of war after witnessing thousands of troops left to die after the Battle of Solferino in 1859. The First Geneva Convention, signed five years later, deals entirely with the protection of military hospitals, field medics, and wounded soldiers.
The Geneva Conventions were updated after World War II to forbid the sort of atrocities that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan had unleashed on the world. Those atrocities included attacks on hospitals. The Italian army in Ethiopia bombed field hospitals numerous times. During the 1942 conquest of Singapore, the Japanese army stormed the city’s British military hospital, arrested patients, and executed some of them.
The four Geneva Conventions adopted in 1949 make it very, very clear that these acts are illegitimate in war. Of course, the laws of war also ban armies from disguising their forces as medical staff or other protected people, an act known as “perfidy.” Israel uses this principle to justify its attacks on hospitals, arguing that Palestinian factions abuse medical cover to protect themselves.
However, the Geneva Conventions have specific rules for dealing with armed forces in hospitals. “The fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals,” and even “the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants,” does not make them into military targets. In cases where armies have abused the protection of medical facilities — by actively staging attacks or moving ammunition there — the enemy must still give clear warnings and allow patients to evacuate.
Israel has invented an entirely made-up standard for dealing with hospitals in war: anyone who has ever committed or might commit an act of war is fair game for killing, anywhere and any time. The presence of any members of an enemy faction in a hospital, whether they’re armed troops or patients on their deathbed, is a form of perfidy. The just response is to attack the hospital without warning or regard to bystanders.
By that standard, the protection of hospitals might as well not exist. The writer Carl Beijer put laid out the logic of the argument pithily: “the laws of war are all well and good for ordinary times, but what if your enemy is waging war against you?”
Under the laws of war that the rest of the world accepts, the Israeli attack on Jenin was a clearer act of perfidy as anything Palestinians have been accused of. Soldiers deceived everyone else by pretending to be neutral medical personnel, then launched a deadly attack while in disguise. It is they, not paralyzed patients, who are killing from behind human shields.
Life's a bitch.