"FACTUAL FINDINGS"

I was told to go read something said to be a newly published and “damning UN report about Israeli war crimes and ‘extermination’ via its war on Gaza's hospitals.”

The document was a Report of Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. It is the third such report to the UN General Assembly by this group and covers the period from October 7th, 2023 to August of 2024. The report states at the outset that it is based largely upon responses to three requests for information: two from the State of Palestine and one from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Reading the report, I did not find anything like what I was expecting. The language and framing of the report of course, is wildly biased in favour of Hamas, because that's the leaning of most UN organizations and, obviously, those who replied to their requests for information. As such, it could only be so. What was surprising was that the report, citing numbers from Hamas and various branches of administration in Gaza, reads to me as particularly damning of the authorities in Gaza along with the international media and so much of their prior reporting.

So what does the UN report say? After a page of introduction, the very first entry under the heading “Factual Findings” tells us that “According to the World Health Organization (WHO), between 7 October 2023 and 30 July 2024, Israel carried out 498 attacks on health-care facilities in the Gaza Strip.” That’s a tremendous number of attacks. Indeed. And they explain that through all of those attacks “110 facilities were affected.”

OKAY. AND?

The first thing to notice is that neither the authors or their sources are attempting to discriminate between entirely justified and lawful military actions and mildly inappropriate actions or obvious war crimes. They're also making no effort to be more neutral and just spell out or even reference the relevant international humanitarian law. That's odd. Do they presume a modicum of sophistication among their intended audience and that it will not be used as propaganda? Or is leaving things fully open to misinterpretation and providing essential war-making materiel for the information side of the conflict part of their intended purpose? I have some guesses.

DO WORDS HAVE MEANINGS?

From that informationless footing, curiously, we then are not told what “attacks” or “facilities” are. Nor do the authors provide any explanation of what “affected” means. The main body of the UN report contains no explicit definitions. Absent, too, are a glossary or any relevant footnotes. For anything more than "factual findings" you have to look up their sources. Their source, in this instance the WHO, offers up a little visual. It shows “110 Health facilities affected” paired with another icon that reads “including 32 hospitals damaged.” But, to my reading, that clarifies nothing and only adds a fourth word that remains undefined: “damaged”. That’s a real problem.

Why is this a problem? Each of those words, if you think about it, could be almost anything. And you might notice that there’s a bit of a difference between a sidewalk Tiger Balm kiosk having an unintended power outage and a cruise missile intentionally turning an emergency room, maternity ward, cancer clinic, nursing school, and Red Crescent compound (and the 1,200 people therein) to dust. Right. So, it seems like we have two critical assessments about the impact of a war, authored and endorsed by key global organizations and those working on their behalf, that would, to my mind, probably fail the assignment if this were a high school Social Studies report.

There are only two reasons I can think of to use vague language of this sort. There’s either a wide spectrum of complicated impacts you’re trying to abbreviate as narrowly as possible, for the purpose of extreme concision when trying to stick it on a chart or Powerpoint, say, or you’re attempting to sneakily inflate your numbers. In the former case, you would never fail to provide a glossary or elaborate footnote or endnote spelling out each instance; or, alternatively, to reference a separate report that does exactly that. Neither happens in this case. Importantly, the UN report indicates, with an asterisk and in fine print below, all over the document when they’re making an assumption or wild guess based on unverified or limited data or, on the other hand, when they’re citing a specific source. In many places they point directly to the Gaza Ministry of Health, UNRWA, or various population surveys. (All of whom appear to be wildly inappropriate sources at this point, but could be justified in some circumstances on the grounds that they are the only sources of information available. If I were citing their data I would append to every figure something like “+/- 100%”.) But, again, they do none of that with the above reference to “facilities”, “attacked”, “affected”, or “damaged”.

I can’t imagine a case where a serious person (let alone serious organizations full of serious people speaking to a serious audience) would regard those omissions as irrelevant. But I could be wrong. Perhaps only to me, none of this seems overly pedantic or needlessly semantic (that is: wondering what is actually happening and to whom.)

So what am I wondering about, specifically? Well, is a “facility” everything under one roof of one building or within the walls of one medical complex? Or is a "facility" anything that could be considered health-care-related infrastructure (such as a water main, electrical box, solar panel, security booth, parking lot, etc) associated with one medical complex? If that seems silly, go look at the Wikipedia page for The Al-Shifa Hospital siege and check out the maps provided there.

In this image alone, without even scouring Google Maps, I count 18 icons highlighting medical-related buildings immediately inside “Al-Shifa hospital”. In addition to the main hospital building there are maternity and NICU buildings, an MRI compound and chest and dialysis building, an outpatient clinic, and more, just as you would expect. And right next to the hospital complex there are more such buildings, including various pharmacies and medical supply shops, a diagnostic centre, nursing association, MSF offices, and more. And there are twice as many buildings that may be perfectly obvious to include as essential services associated with the same “facility”. Or, very obviously, many of those could just as well be thought of as individual “facilities”. Or, it would seem strange to exclude a Doctors Without Borders operation from the category "health-care facilities" or from its clear connection to, in this case, the Al-Shifa hospital.

Right. So, if a bomb goes off in the middle of all of that and shrapnel takes out windows in, shuts down power to, or forces the movement of patients from one building to 30 different buildings, how does that get recorded? As one attack on one facility? One attack on or affecting 30 facilities? 30 attacks on 30 facilities? It seems to me the distinction matters if we’re trying, at all, to understand what’s taken place.

And, as above, what could the word “affected” cover? Are we talking about bombs going off? Are we even talking about direct military operations? Certainly those are included. But what else? If one intensive care unit temporarily has power go down that has to be “affected”. Right? And then if the patients there have to be moved to ten separate health-care facilities, does that get chalked up as part of the former, as one, or as 11 “affected facilities”? Well, I hope you can see that how all these different things are accounted presents the same information in a very different light. (And how has this been handled in Ukraine and Somalia?)

“AFFECTED FACILITIES”

To drill down further and try to get to the bottom of what “affected” means, the July 2024 WHO situation report, referenced in the UN assessment, makes a vague and indirect clarification. There they share numbers on “Health Facility functionality and access.” They explain that, 10 months into the war, 44% of hospitals are “partially functional” and 45% of primary health-care facilities are “functional.” To that they add fine print reading:

Partially functional facility: when a health facility is unable to fully provide some or all of the services as normal, or there is an interruption in any of the services provided at the facility, due to various reasons.

Later they explain that “partially functional hospitals” are those “partially accessible due to insecurity or physical barriers, such as damage to both patient and ambulance entrances, and surrounding roads.” Right. And, weirdly, they spell out elsewhere that disruption to health facility functionality may also include "evacuation orders". Of their numbers, they explain “One primary healthcare center and five medical points are within the evacuation area announced on 27 and 28 July.”

Right, so it seems “110 facilities were affected”, as in the UN report, is just as broad and general as it sounds and would include almost any activity by any party (even those aimed at saving lives or providing health-care) including: distant gunfire (from anyone), a crater or rubble in a parking lot (caused by Islamic Jihad or the IAF), a food or medical equipment truck parked or broken down and abandoned in the road (by UN World Food Programme or the Gaza Ministry of Health or by civilians), or a humanitarian evacuation (initiated and endorsed by Amnesty International and the UN.) Any of that could result in something less than normal operation and result in a facility being tabulated as "affected". Right.

More than that, and corroborating the above to some degree, the UN report, citing the WHO, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health, tells us there are hospitals in Gaza that, after almost a year of “the most brutal war anyone has ever seen” have sustained no damage worth noting. Does that resemble the impression you've been given by any party over all these months, from the media and on social media? Without reading this report, who would wager that to be the case? My media consumption has yielded an impression that there have been virtually no functioning hospitals and health-care facilities in Gaza since 2023, that all had been damaged or rendered unusable, and many were utterly pulverized by Israeli bombs, leaving nothing but moon-like craters where emergency rooms and palliative care wards once stood. So this UN report seems to contradict everything I've seen and heard. And if that's been the impact (or lack thereof) on infrastructure, what of the impact on the people of Gaza?

THE HUMAN COST

Well, illuminating a small part of the human impact of these “facilities” being “affected”, the UN report explains that “[a] total of 747 persons were killed directly in those attacks…” They also spell out that “The stated justification of the Israeli security forces for the attacks was that Hamas was using hospitals for military purposes, including as command-and-control centres.” If that is so, of course, the attacks could very well be in accordance with international humanitarian law, especially if the Israeli military issued evacuation warnings, which the report also admits.

Regardless, what do you notice about the number they present? 747 is that almost impossibly small when contrasted with a year of reporting and the declarations by all relevant organizations and their spokespersons and leaders. The report says there were 498 attacks. And, by all reporting and emphatic assertion, the loss of life with each attack was unbelievably catastrophic due to the Israeli Defence Force (by extension the government of Israel and, of course, depending on your perspective, the people of Israel, all Jews, all white people, all Westerners, or perhaps merely all non-Muslims…) having not just a lack of regard for Palestinian life but genocidal intent — which is so abhorrently paired with an endless supply of guided missiles and 2,000lb bombs. Right.

But, actually, the number of attacks is far lower than 498. No doubt inadvertently, the authors almost spell out what an “attack” is later in their report. They tell us how the “WHO reported that 78 per cent of the attacks … were carried out through military force…” So 388 used “military force” (as ever, that too is undefined.) Okay, so is that averaging fewer than 2 fatalities per attack? That’s for every intentional military attack on a health-care facility by a genocidal nuclear power with total control over land, sea, and air? 

And is there any reason to believe this number 747 is, in reality, even 1/10 that? Or, to put that another way, is there very good reason to believe that right from the beginning of the war the numbers on offer have been inflated by at least one order of magnitude? Troublingly, there is. And, yes, despite the outlandish claims to the contrary.

“AT LEAST 500 DEAD”

As early as October of 2023, we were hearing harrowing reports from the same health authority cited here by the UN and WHO as providers of good data and folks referencing credible witnesses. They told us Israel was killing dozens and even hundreds of innocent Palestinians with each bomb they dropped and every assault they made on sites throughout Gaza. Virtually all media outlets ran with that and reported things like “At least 500 killed in attack on hospital.” Heads of state, monarchs, UN representatives, human rights groups and a billion more social media all repeated as much while also feeling compelled to respond with outrage. That kicked off public rallies and riots in city centres everywhere.

This specific example of one bomb hitting one hospital and killing “more than 500” really is critical. With so much attention, in the weeks and months that followed that incident there were many varied investigations exploring video, photographs, satellite images, audio, witness interviews, and more. While the press, human rights organizations, governments, and the UN ran with “at least 500 dead” by a “genocidal Israel”, a radically different picture emerged — one that creates some amount of consilience with the above UN report and then seriously calls all of it into question.

But even without knowing anything more, in light of the above numbers, what are the options here? If a total of roughly 750 were killed over a year of attacks, either very few were actually killed in that one attack, said to have killed “more than 500” and deemed a “heinous war crime” committed by an “Israeli occupation force devoid of the most basic human values” or that number is accurate and virtually no one was killed in the 99.8% of the Israeli attacks on health-care facilities over the entire year following this one attack. You simply can’t have both. Can you? You can accept the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers (as the WHO, UN, and every media outlet appear to) and also everyone’s assertion that there is a systematic attack on health-care facilities for the purpose of mass extermination. Or nothing of the sort has taken place. The investigations of that first attack make the answer pretty clear.

In the light of day, no one could find damage or projectile fragmentation at the site of the impact on Al-Ahli hospital consistent with Israeli weapons or intentions (even if you attribute to them the worst possible intentions.) The hospital was definitely not struck with a high-explosive bomb or guided missile. In fact, to be perfectly accurate, nothing struck the hospital. Something far more closely approximating a misfired Palestinian rocket blew up in the parking lot. That explosion seems to have ignited a cooking fuel canister in one of the cars parked there and the fuel several directly impacted vehicles. And not only does everyone agree that those Palestinian rockets are low-yield and fired indiscriminately but also that up to 20% of them misfire in just the manner suggested. 

And all of this is offered not by the IDF or US intelligence but by media and organizations that have proven themselves to be rabidly anti-Israel. More than that, what we now know is that Gaza authorities, by their own admission, were in possession of the relevant rocket fragments that would allow the world to make a conclusive evaluation of what had taken place. On the evening of the explosion, a photo was taken showing a Gaza police unit, the specialized Explosive Ordnance Department, working at the location of the crater. More than that, a witness who was at the hospital on the evening of the explosion testified in an investigation by Human Rights Watch that “the Ministry of Interior took all the shrapnel that was on the site.” A Hamas official even told the world that they had those remnants and they would “soon be shown to the world” (exposing the evil and murderous Zionists for who they are.) Needless to say, that never happened. Then Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas leader and deputy minister in the Hamas-led Gaza governing authority, told the media that “the missile has dissolved like salt in the water.… It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.” Naturally, none of these facts change the perspectives on the raging anti-Semites marching in our streets, vandalizing homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship across the globe. Naturally.

And if the physical evidence of the metal rocket carcass vaporized, “dissolved like salt in the water”, what do you imagine happened to the casualty numbers? Well, as Human Rights Watch explains: 

While the Ministry of Health in Gaza said 471 people were killed, Mohammed Abu Selmia, the general director of al-Shifa Hospital, which received the victims, told the media the death toll was closer to 250. Human Rights Watch reviewed two images published by the Associated Press stating to show victims of the al-Ahli explosion who were brought to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, including an image taken during a news conference that a representative from the Ministry of Health in Gaza and medical staff from the hospital gave regarding the explosion. These images display between 65 and 75 body bags, rolled-up carpets, and bodies. Human Rights Watch could not independently verify whether all of these victims were from the al-Ahli explosion.

Hmm. “Israelis deliberately killed at least 500 innocent Gazans” sublimates into “Palestinians accidentally killed maybe 70 of their own.” And with that the story becomes repellant to effectively everyone who commented on it and was so motivated by these events to entirely unmask their inner anti-Jewish bigot and riot in the streets. Of course.

And do we get any indication from the UN special investigation (or the WHO they cite, or the health ministry they rely upon) what the status of this “more than 500 killed” is within the “747” figure for total deaths caused by “Israeli” “attacks” on “health-care facilities” over eleven months? Do they omit the number altogether? Do they go with 65? Given there's no forensic certainty I don't know why they would go with either. If they did use some number, any number, for this attack alone, wouldn't their total be far more accurately accounted for with some level of uncertainty? Something like “between 300 and 1,500” or thereabouts? Really, how could you justify anything other? “747” seems pretty damn precise when no available source can tell us if the number of just this one "attack" was closer to 50 or 500. All we can be reasonably sure of is that the fatalities resulting from the not-bombing of a parking lot were far below and not above 500, as so enthusiastically contended.

And then what if you should dare to go further? What if you wonder how many of these people killed were active combatants and how many were innocent, non-combatants? And what if you find no breakdown in this damning report? What if there's not even so much as a recognition of any distinction between the two, combatant and non? The conclusion you might be forgiven for coming to is that, of all the parties and international institutions involved and investigating, it may be only the IDF who gives a damn.