Iran is offering some pretty flimsy excuses to explain how dozens of people were injured in a missile attack that hit a hospital... and Israel is not buying them.
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An Iranian missile strike on a medical center in the Israeli city of Beersheba on Thursday morning not only wounded dozens of people (fortunately, most of the injuries they sustained were minor), it was also a violation of the Geneva Convention, which states that civilian hospitals are not to be targeted under any circumstance.
Iran predictably said that the Soroka Medical Center was not the intended target of the attack, and that the missiles were instead meant for nearby military sites, which is the kind of excuse barbaric regimes always make when they hit hospitals… either intentionally or inadvertently.
“Earlier today, our powerful Armed Forces accurately eliminated an Israeli Military Command, Control & Intelligence HQ and another vital target,” said Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. “The blast wave caused superficial damage to a small section of the nearby, and largely evacuated, Soroka Military Hospital.”
However, Soroka is not a military hospital, and a quick look at a map of the area shows that the military facilities of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that were relocated to the Gav-Yam hi-tech park earlier this year are, indeed, more than half a mile away.
The Geneva Conventions state that, “In view of the dangers to which hospitals may be exposed by being close to military objectives, it is recommended that such hospitals be situated as far as possible from such objectives.”
So, a few thousand feet should certainly be sufficient.
In any case, Israeli officials were rightfully outraged by the bombing of a civilian hospital.
“This is a terrorist act deliberately targeting a hospital; it’s a red line to attack hospitals, which treat women, children, the elderly, and the helpless,” Health Minister Uriel Busso told the Jerusalem Post.
And Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “these are war crimes of the worst kind, and [Iranian leader Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes.”
It should be noted that there is a loophole in the Geneva Conventions that war criminals try to exploit to justify attacks on hospitals… even those that leave scores of civilians, including women and children, dead.
Specifically, the treaty states that the “protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.”
That is what Iran claims is happening here.
“The facility is mainly used to treat Israeli soldiers engaged in the Genocide in Gaza 25 miles away, where Israel has destroyed or damaged 94 percent of Palestinian hospitals,” Araghchi stated.
However, the Geneva Conventions, to which both Iran and Israel are signatories (although the latter does not believe it applies to Gaza, which is a position the International Committee of the Red Cross, the organization tasked with implementing and upholding the Conventions, disagrees with) makes it quite clear that merely treating soldiers does not make a civilian hospital a military installation.
“The fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals, or the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants and not yet handed to the proper service, shall not be considered to be acts harmful to the enemy,” it states.
And even if a hospital is used for military purposes, which is something an attacking nation can easily claim without providing evidence, then its protection under the Conventions only ceases “after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.”
In other words, you can’t just bomb a hospital, or more than 30, for example, by claiming that they are used as shields for military installations, especially not without giving advance notice. Otherwise, many innocent people would be slaughtered.
Finally, Araghchi also makes the argument that Israel started the recent conflict.
“It is the Israeli regime and not Iran that initiated all this bloodshed, and it is Israeli war criminals and not Iranians who are targeting hospitals and civilians,” he said. “Hundreds of innocent Iranians have been murdered in cold blood since Israel launched its illegal war against the Iranian people last week.”
That is inconsequential when it comes to who commits war crimes.
If, for example, a country is attacked by another nation, or even just an organization associated (or not associated) with such a nation, that does not give the target of the attack the right to strike at hospitals or commit other war crimes, such as using starvation as a method of warfare or committing other crimes against humanity, just to name a couple of random ones.
All of this should be pretty obvious, but at least it seems that everybody is now in agreement that intentionally bombing civilian hospitals is a war crime, and that those responsible for such attacks must be held to account.
