The blame game between Israel and Hamas over Tuesday’s bombing of the Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist Hospital, in which over than 500 people were killed, shows how Israel is trying to avoid the blame for war crimes, and how its favourite victim card is wearing thin. Its blaming the bombing on a misguided missile fired by Islamic Jihad serves two purposes: first, it lets its own forces escape culpability for something that is considered a classic war crime; second, it throws the blame onto an organization it badly wants to go after because of its ties with Iran
Another subtext of the Israeli attempt to throw the blame onto the Palestinians is perhaps its desire to portray them as guilty of the crime they have themselves committed so often, the killing of children. The reaction to the hospital bombing, with the victims including a large number of infants, has caused a revulsion of feeling even within those countries which have been steadfast in their support of Israel. Israel contrasts that reality with the failure of its claim that Hamas had decapitated babies in its October 7 attacks. It had wanted Hamas to have done so, judging by how much that claim was pushed, but it was so patently false, that it failed to gain any traction, even among the Western powers that, like the USA, have gotten behind Israel and are throwing their weight behind the Israeli narrative of a misguided Palestinian rocket hitting the hospital.
The problem with the Israeli narrative is that it has been guilty of bombing hospitals before, claiming that they were being used by Palestinian fighters as ‘safe havens’ from which to attack with impunity. It seems that it realizes that its previous narrative, that Israeli forces would strike wherever they felt the need to, regardless of the restraints placed on combatants by the laws of war, would no longer wash in the face of the enormity of the crime that had been committed, and the huge number of innocent victims. Instead of the blind backing of Israel, covering any war crimes its forces might commit, the Western powers must obey their own principles, which call for a regard for the rights of the oppressed, including the right of self-determination. The Palestinian people are only asking for their rights as human beings, not for having their hospitals bombed.
