A Hospital for Me, Rubble for Thee: Israel’s Weaponized Hypocrisy on International Law

Israel’s sudden moral outrage over the bombing of one of its own hospitals would be laughable—if it weren’t so grotesque. In a bitter twist of irony, the Israeli government now decries a strike on its medical facility as an “unspeakable war crime,” after months of systematically dismantling Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure with hardly a hint of remorse. The hypocrisy is staggering and cannot go unchallenged.

Gaza’s Healthcare System in Ruins

For months, the Israeli military has pounded Gaza’s hospitals, clinics, and ambulances, effectively turning healthcare into a battlefield. At least 36 hospitals in Gaza have been bombed or burned by Israeli forces since the war began. In just the first seven months of fighting, 24 of Gaza’s hospitals were put out of service and 493 health workers were killed, according to UN figures. Gaza’s health system has been “systematically dismantled,” reduced to improvised clinics amid ruins. Medical facilities that were once lifelines are now themselves lifeless husks.

Ambulances have been turned into twisted metal on Gaza’s streets. On November 3, 2023, an Israeli airstrike obliterated an ambulance convoy outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others. This was no isolated incident—human rights investigators report that Israeli forces struck clearly marked ambulances on multiple occasions, including a deadly blast that killed and wounded a dozen people at al-Shifa’s gates. Paramedics, patients in transit, and bystanders have all been among the victims.

Hospitals themselves have borne the brunt of the onslaught. Al-Shifa Hospital—Gaza’s largest—was besieged and largely destroyed during a two-week Israeli raid, with “hundreds of people killed, including medical staff,” and mass arrests of doctors and patients on the premises. Major institutions like Al-Quds Hospital, Nasser Hospital, the Indonesian Hospital and others have been bombed or stormed, often with devastating loss of life. In some cases, entire hospital campuses were reduced to rubble. Newborns in neonatal units have not been spared; premature babies died after their incubators lost power when Israeli offensives knocked out electricity. Doctors watched in despair as emergency rooms turned into morgues amid the relentless bombardment.

Beyond the hospitals, entire neighborhoods have been flattened with families still inside, burying thousands under the debris of their homes. Gaza’s health ministry reports over 55,000 Palestinians killed since the war’s onset—more than half of them women and children. Each number is a human life, often an entire family wiped out in an instant. International observers have repeatedly warned that Israel’s campaign in Gaza is inflicting “unprecedented” civilian suffering, yet such warnings have been met with official indifference—at times even smirks or shrugs from Israeli officials—as the destruction rages on.

Dubious Justifications and “Dual-Use” Targets

How has Israel rationalized turning hospitals and ambulances into targets? The Israeli military’s stock answer has been to label these sites “dual-use” facilities—in other words, to claim that Hamas fighters were hiding in or under hospitals, effectively using them as shields. By this logic, a hospital that houses militants or weapons supposedly “loses its protected status” under international law and becomes a legitimate target. Every strike on a clinic or ambulance was justified with the same refrain: Hamas made us do it. Israeli officials repeatedly alleged that Gaza’s hospitals were really “terrorist nests” or command centers in disguise.

But here’s the problem: those allegations were alarmingly thin on evidence. In reality, no concrete evidence was ever presented to support the sweeping claim that Hamas was using hospitals as bases. At times, the IDF released vague statements, grainy drone footage, or computer-generated diagrams purporting to show tunnel entrances beneath a hospital. None of this “proof” was independently verified; none demonstrated that doctors, patients, or infants in incubators were somehow legitimate targets. As Human Rights Watch noted in November, despite the Israeli army’s talk of “Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,” nothing has been put forward that would justify stripping hospitals or ambulances of their protected status under the laws of war. Even if armed fighters were present (something that remains unproven in many cases), that still would not legally excuse bombing a functioning hospital full of sick and wounded civilians. The Geneva Conventions don’t evaporate simply because one side makes an accusation.

Yet Israel shrugged off these legal and moral constraints. Time and again, its forces hit medical facilities on mere suspicion, or on the cynical assumption that any large civilian structure in Gaza might conceal militants. Western governments largely gave Israel a pass, echoing the “self-defense” mantra while Gaza’s healthcare system was being blown to bits. Mainstream media headlines often parroted Israeli talking points about “Hamas in hospitals,” blurring the line between a protected clinic and a legitimate military target. International condemnation was muted or met with deflection. Israeli spokespeople, when pressed for evidence, offered platitudes: “Our strikes are based on intelligence,” one said—as if that alone settles the matter. In short, Israel acted with a chilling impunity, convinced that its narrative of “terrorists under the hospital beds” would outweigh the grim reality witnessed by the world: medics and patients killed, ambulances in flames, and children pulled from the wreckage of places that should have been safe havens.

Outrage Only When the Tables Turn

All of this makes Israel’s current moral outrage profoundly hard to stomach. On June 19, 2025, the war’s logic came full circle: the bombs came home. In the early hours of that day, Iranian missiles struck Soroka Medical Center in the Israeli city of Beersheba—a major hospital that treats civilians but also doubles as a military hospital for the Israel Defense Forces. The reaction from Israeli leaders was immediate and furious. Within hours, officials were on the global stage, condemning the Soroka strike as a heinous war crime and an attack on all humanity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thundered that “the tyrants in Tehran will pay the full price” for this outrage. Defense Minister Israel Katz likened Iran’s Supreme Leader to “a modern Hitler” who must be eradicated. Israel’s health minister called the attack “an act of terror,” accusing Iran of “deliberately targeting innocent civilians and medical teams.” Another senior official railed that Iran had “launched missiles at hospitals, the elderly, and children,” invoking the most visceral of horrors.

Israeli media dutifully amplified this narrative with dramatic footage of Soroka’s blasted windows and evacuated patients. A hospital was hit, and for the first time in this war, Israel presented itself unambiguously as the victim: See how monstrous our enemies are. On the surface, such outrage would be entirely justified—attacking a hospital is indeed a war crime. But coming from the very government that turned Gaza’s hospitals into rubble, the outrage rang utterly hollow. It is difficult to describe Israel’s posture in this moment as anything other than state-sanctioned gaslighting. The same government that made healthcare in Gaza a battleground now beats its chest and cries foul when its own medical center is struck.

Consider the bitter irony: Soroka Medical Center is one of Israel’s largest military hospitals, a facility that treats IDF soldiers wounded in the Gaza campaign. By Israel’s own definitions, Soroka can be seen as a “dual-use” hospital—the very label Israeli officials used to justify bombing Al-Shifa and other Gazan hospitals. In other words, Israel is now demanding absolute protection for a hospital that it knows is serving its military, even as it denied that same protection to Palestinian hospitals on the flimsiest of claims. The double standard could not be more glaring. When Israeli forces bombed Al-Shifa, they insisted it was a Hamas command post (while producing no solid proof); when Soroka was hit, suddenly no amount of evidence could justify such an attack, because a hospital is inviolable.

This isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s a collapse of any moral high ground Israel pretends to hold. As one commentator observed, “You cannot bomb hospitals for 20 months, excuse it as military necessity, and then call it a war crime when it happens to you.” Israel, in effect, wants to have it both ways: flatten Gaza’s hospitals and shrug it off, but hold up its own hospital as a sacred space whose bombing demands global outrage. It is propaganda dressed up as principle, a theatrical performance of victimhood that attempts to rewrite the very rules Israel has trampled in Gaza.

Propaganda vs. Principle

If international law is to mean anything at all, it cannot be applied selectively. You don’t get to invoke the “sanctity of medical centers” only when it’s your hospital on fire, after scorning those same laws in your neighbor’s backyard. Right now, Israel’s appeals to humanitarian norms are echoing into a void of its own making. Every strike on a Gazan ambulance or clinic, every doctor killed under airstrike, every infant who died gasping for air in an incubator, has stripped Israel’s words of credibility. As long as Gaza’s health facilities lie in scorched ruins, Israel’s claim to moral outrage will ring hollow.

This is not a complicated principle: Hospitals must never be battlefields. Not in Beersheba. Not in Gaza City. Not anywhere. The laws of war explicitly protect medical units and personnel for a reason—to preserve a shred of humanity in the midst of conflict. Israel cynically undermined those laws in Gaza, and in doing so, undermined its own right to cry foul. The world should not indulge this charade. The international community—governments, media, and citizens alike—must call out what we are witnessing by its true name: a grotesque double standard, effectively a state-enabled gaslighting of global opinion.

Until there is real accountability for the widespread destruction of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, any newfound concern Israel shows for international law is performative at best. Justice cannot be a one-way street. If hospitals are sacrosanct, they are sacrosanct for everyone—the infant in a Gaza incubator deserves the same protection as the IDF soldier in an Israeli recovery ward. The world must insist on this basic consistency. Anything less is an endorsement of impunity, where “might makes right” and humanitarian principles are nothing but tools of convenience. In the final analysis, Israel’s posture of outrage, absent any reckoning with its own actions, is not just hollow—it is grotesque in its cynicism. And the world must not be afraid to say so.