Marginal military gains won’t stop a famine in Gaza

There’s much we don’t understand about Israel’s raid on the Gaza Strip’s Shifa Hospital with tanks and bulldozers Monday.

But the hospital assault raises further questions about Israel’s stated aim of eradicating Hamas in Gaza as a whole. After all, if Israeli forces — having already invaded the hospital four months ago — cannot keep Hamas from reconstituting in one of the most watched institutions in the area, how will it keep Hamas or some extremist successor from reconstituting somewhere else in Gaza?

Israeli forces may have achieved military gains in the latest attack on Shifa: They said they killed 20 militants, including one senior official. On the other hand, an unknown number of Palestinians were also reported killed, some possibly suffocating from smoke. Medical services were further disrupted in an area where children are already dying of malnutrition.

Reports from Gaza say that Israel may plan to move people sheltering at the hospital to a “safe zone,” the Muwasi area, but that seems not to have happened before the raid. If Israel cannot manage to evacuate the 30,000 people in and around the hospital and get them housed and fed, how does it propose to move, house and feed some 1.4 million people sheltering in the city of Rafah, which Israel also plans to invade so that it can defeat Hamas militants there?

The news of the Israeli assault on Shifa Hospital coincided with a report from an international authority that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza. This is enormously important: This authority has not declared a famine anywhere in the world since one in South Sudan in 2017.

The assault on Shifa Hospital underscores the challenges faced by Israeli authorities when Hamas hides among civilians. Hamas deserves condemnation for that and for its failure to pursue a desperately needed cease-fire. But Israel, too, has a role and must decide which targets to attack, what humanitarian costs are acceptable and whether to focus on moving tanks or moving relief trucks.

The juxtaposition of an aggressive military move by Israel on a hospital and the lack of a more substantial effort to ease the movement of food trucks into northern Gaza suggests that Israeli leaders are more focused on marginal military gains than on easing starvation among civilians.

I hope President Joe Biden will apply his considerable leverage on Israel so that its priority becomes averting famine.

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