The question of a giant tunnel underneath Gaza’s largest hospital stalked and defined Israel’s very mission in Gaza. Before the mid-November raid and evacuation of Al-Shifa Medical Center, the NY Times’ top story, day after day, was the stakes of the hospital raid.
For four consecutive days, readers were told what the Israel Defense Forces found under Al-Shifa would go far in deciding the legitimacy of Israel’s mission.
“Israel’s ability to prove its claim that Hamas was using hospitals as cover could be key to whether its foreign allies continue to support its military response to Hamas’s attack.”
NYT Lede Story Nov 13-16
Tunnel, Vision
Upon securing the hospital and discovering that a long tunnel did run under the hospital’s grounds, Israel began making videos of their findings. These videos were ridiculed by those predisposed to doubt Israeli claims, or those thrilled to engage in games of gotcha with Israeli military spokesmen. CNN ran an entire report about the positioning of one rifle discovered on hospital grounds. Two days after the IDF raid on Al-Shifa, the BBC fact-checking unit, Verify, also ran a report on that one rifle’s placement, as well as the detection of an edit in an IDF video, the significance of which was left unanswered. Popular progressive U.S. outlets like The Young Turks, made great sport of what it said was the paucity of evidence Israel was uncovering in and around Al-Shifa. On social media and in Reddit groups, the number of automatic rifles and hand grenades stored by the designated terrorist group operating in and under the hospital was mocked as too few guns and hand grenades for a terrorist group to possess in order to be considered a legitimate worry.
A Dismissive Scoff At A Serious Tunnel
Memes aside, there really were shafts, tunnels, weapons, living quarters and signs of recent occupation in tunnels underneath the grounds of Gaza’s largest hospital. These discoveries were treated by skeptics with more eye rolling and derision than a George Santos tweet, but they did exist. It’s as if the proverbial smoking gun in a murder mystery was laughed off as not smoky enough, or not being the exact caliber that the scoffers claimed was promised. But step outside the circle of group derision for just a moment and it is easy to find pretty reasonable explanations for why there wouldn’t be massive caches of weaponry under the hospital. Even news organizations suspicious of Israel’s assertions noted that with ample notice given to the doctors, patients, and subterranean dwellers of Al-Shifa, it is extremely likely that militants fled the hospital complex in plenty of time to take their weapons with them. The BBC conceded this point:
But unless Israel has more to reveal, the military's controversial operation inside the hospital did not net a major arsenal of weapons, reports the BBC's Orla Guerin in Jerusalem.
Hamas knew Israel was coming, and therefore, if they were operating beneath the hospital, they would have had weeks to clear out through Gaza's extensive tunnel network, our correspondent adds.
Israel would go on to document more of what they found, share some of their assessments with news organizations, and eventually destroy the tunnel, because Hamas tunnels are dangerously booby-trapped and of course connected to other Hamas tunnels, the destruction of which is central to Israel’s military mission.
Given the voluminous evidence, the left-leaning Israel newspaper Haaretz treated the existence of a well-documented large tunnel, with rooms branching off, living areas, bathrooms, and weapons found, as a vindication of Israel’s central claims. The Washington Post retained its incredulity, concluding that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.”
Controlling For Ambiguity
The idea that the tunnel was more than just a tunnel, that it was a “command and control center” (or “command and control node” in the Americans’ verbiage) is central to Israel’s skeptics’ claims. But there is a problem with proving or disproving “command and control” capability. The phrase sounds grand but it really is basic. The U.S. Army defines “command and control” this way:
“Command is the authoritative act of making decisions and ordering action, while control is the act of monitoring and influencing that action”
A “command and control center “or “node” is simply any facility from which military commands can be issued and assessed. It doesn’t rely on a particularly sophisticated set-up or means of communication. We may think of “command and control” as an imposing physical space, but it’s less of a noun and more a verb. The means of achieving command and control in modern guerilla warfare is usually through a couple of encrypted laptops and cell phones.
How we think of a “command and control center”...
An actual “command and control center”n...
Blame does fall on the IDF itself for creating one misperception of what the actual tunnels would look like. An animation of what to expect of the tunnels, released before the siege of Al-Shifa by the IDF, was too well-produced, promising office chairs, carpeted meeting rooms, and missiles lined up like little green pencils in a dutiful student’s art supply case.
The animation’s set designers were given too big a budget. When the real tunnel was reveled to be shabby and bleak, it created a mismatch with expectations.
Nevertheless, the actual tunnel was, as documented by the NY Times in its most recent coverage, a massive and a potent staging ground. The paper found “Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.”
From NYT Front Page 2/14/24
It turned out the tunnel was twice as long as originally thought after its initial discovery. U.S. and Israel military sources revealed “underground bunkers, living quarters and a room that appeared to be wired for computers and communications equipment along a part of the tunnel beyond the hospital — chambers that were not visible in the video released by the Israeli military.”
The story contained the de rigueur accusations, credited to “critics of the Israeli military”, that Israel “has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center” under the hospital. What would constitute such proof, given that “command and control” is an action more than it is a discoverable artifact? There is no piece of equipment marketed “Command-n-Control 2000” to be found.
We now know that, according to U.S. intelligence sources, hostages were held by Hamas in and under Al-Shifa. We have long known that during the 2014 Gaza conflict Amnesty International acknowledged Hamas used Al-Shifa as a base to interrogate and torture their political enemies. We also know that video footage has been released of Hamas operatives dragging both wounded and healthy hostages into Al-Shifa on October 7th. They would have bypassed several closer hospitals to get to Al-Shifa. We have video evidence, intelligence analysis, open-source visuals and satellite imagery, adding up to abundant evidence that the hospital was a place of both healing and of terrible war crimes.
The concept of “proof” is hard to agree upon, and harder still in war when accusations and denial flies as fiercely as bullets - when early impressions take hold and are not easily shaken, and when the characteristic fog is blown about by the biases of the observer. As much as we can declare anything “proved” in such circumstances, I believe it has been proved there was a massive Hamas tunnel under Al-Shifa which served the purposes of that terrorist organization, namely to bring about the deaths of legions of Israeli civilians. It clearly was a base of operations, and a significant asset to Hamas.
Our Ethical Considerations Aren’t Done Though
And yet, it was under a hospital, which meant raiding the facility and shutting down hospital operations had enormous costs to the innocent. Premature babies died, countless patients couldn’t receive required medical care. Just as we do a disservice to truth and accuracy to deny that there was a Hamas tunnel under Al-Shifa, we shirk our responsibilities as ethical actors if we don’t acknowledge and grapple with the actual costs of Israel’s decision to shut down Al-Shifa as a hospital to neutralize the military facility co-existing beneath and within it.
As a journalist and (I believe) an ethical person, I have only one wish when it comes to the question of Al-Shifa and the tunnel. The wish isn’t as grand as re-writing the history of Hamas, or the tragedy of October 7th, or the proportionality of Israel’s response. It’s to change one word: “if” to “though”. The question we put to Israel, the world community, the Biden administration, international humanitarian organizations, and each other, should cease to be “even IF Hamas was operating extensively under Al-Shifa….” We should forthwith ask “Even THOUGH Hamas was operating extensively under Al-Shifa…” That is the accurate premise from which all the difficult-to-answer questions need to flow.
At the very least, we need to discard the notion that there was no tunnel, or no significant tunnel, or no threatening-to-the-lives-of-Israelis tunnel under Al-Shifa. If the premise is misstated then we’re not actually engaged in an ethical discussion. We’re sidestepping one, in favor of a propaganda-induced evasion of having to make hard decisions.
This is great—especially the closing paragraphs with the thoughts on a distinction between if and though. That's an important part of any discussion, and particularly timely. Thank you!
This is great—especially the closing paragraphs with the thoughts on a distinction between if and though. That's an important part of any discussion, and particularly timely. Thank you!
Good thing Israel has bombed every hospital in Gaza at this point.