The investigative documentary film “The Hospital War… The Doctrine of Displacement” reveals that the Israeli military strategy to target hospitals in the Gaza Strip is linked to the occupation’s doctrine of displacement, which was practiced against the Palestinians in 1948.
Relying on graphic analysis, digital monitoring, and tracking satellite images, the documentary titled “The Hospital War…A Displacement Doctrine” highlights; The real Israeli goals behind emptying hospitals in the Gaza Strip of displaced people who fled the bombing, and it appears that the Israeli military strategy to impose forced displacement was not absent from the 2023 Gaza War, which recorded the highest death toll since the Nakba, according to Palestinian figures.
In his testimony, Johnny Mansour, a historian and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the Academic College in Beit Berl, links what the occupation is practicing today in Gaza and what the Zionist gangs committed during the Nakba. He says that many massacres were committed against the Palestinians in 1948, and targeted hospitals, dispensaries and medical clinics. The occupation then issued instructions and leaflets from aircraft – as is the case today – calling on Palestinians to leave their homes and villages.
According to what was stated in the documentary broadcast on the Tel Aviv Tribune YouTube channel, Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023 took a more brutal military turn, focusing on 4 stages, the main title of which were hospitals.
He points out that Israel defined its goals from the first day of the war, as its army announced on October 13 a “safe passage” for displacement using Salah al-Din Street (central Gaza Strip), and asked residents to leave their homes and move towards the south of the Strip, then dropped leaflets calling for Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes. Before that, the Israeli Air Force intensified its raids on civilian buildings in the north and center of Gaza City.
Systematic targeting of hospitals
In the same context, a retired Brigadier General in the Lebanese Army, Hisham Jaber, indicated in his testimony that since the beginning of the aggression against Gaza, the basic strategy was to displace the largest possible number of Gazans from the Strip and control it.
The documentary focused on the Israeli strategy related to bombing health centers, especially hospitals, to force residents to flee, which was indicated by Elise Baker, a lawyer in the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council, who said that since Israel began the war on Gaza, it has bombed medical centers and facilities and workers in the Strip. Health, stressing that the demands to evacuate health facilities and the bombing indicate the existence of a strategy of forced displacement in Israel.
The occupation began its targeting of hospitals – according to the documentary – by cutting off supplies of fuel, electricity and water to the residents of the Strip, and preventing the arrival of medical supplies to hospitals in the northern part in particular as a prelude to implementing the Israeli strategy in its most violent form.
The film – which is Tel Aviv Tribune Arabic’s first about the ongoing war in Gaza – documents the targeting of subsidiary and main hospitals. On October 9, Beit Hanoun Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip was out of service, two days after the bombing, and then hospitals and health centers went out. From the service successively, until the entire health sector collapsed in the northern Gaza Strip.
The most violent transformation occurred when the occupation army targeted the Baptist Hospital on October 17 with a devastating bombing. This hospital was one of the main gatherings for displaced people from the northern Gaza Strip.
In addition to hospitals, the occupation targeted medical teams and ambulances. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a surgeon and volunteer with the Doctors Without Borders mission in Gaza, says that the physical elimination of doctors was systematic and deliberate, as the occupation targeted doctors working in specialties that are very lacking in Gaza, such as a pathologist. Kidney and the only emergency specialist.
After targeting Baptist Hospital, Israel established a line of fire forcing the injured and residents of northern Gaza to move south within the specified path on Salah al-Din Street.
Sector unloading and division schemes
The documentary concluded – after analyzing the timeline of the targeting of hospitals and their successive exit from service – that there is a direct correlation with the movement of displacement from the north of the Gaza Strip towards the south, with a displacement volume of one million and 900 thousand from the north to the south.
It also obtained special satellite images that followed the implementation of the hospital emptying strategy, and revealed the establishment of a paved road by the Israeli army along a path separating the north and south of the Strip and a checkpoint near Salah al-Din Street, which intersects with what was stated in the leak of the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence policy paper at the 13th meeting. October on the importance of leaving the port of exodus movement within a specific path to impose forced displacement to Sinai as part of plans to empty and divide the sector.
For his part, Gillis Deqiris, a lawyer at the International Criminal Court, confirms that more than one and a half million Palestinians left their areas in a state of forced deportation, while during the Nakba the number reached 700,000 in an entire year, describing what is happening in Gaza as “unprecedented violence.” “.
The film mentions that the Israeli military strategy towards hospitals moved to the southern Gaza Strip, which raises the question of whether hospitals are a means to achieve a larger strategic goal that involves changing the region through forced displacement, as happened in 1948.
The retired Brigadier General in the Lebanese Army says that despite its occupation of 80% of the northern Gaza Strip, Israel has not yet controlled it.