Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author whose weekly column currently appears in The Times of London.
14 November 2023
This morning, I appeared on TalkTV to discuss the anti-Israel demonstrations in London, particularly those that took place this last Saturday. You can watch the segment by clicking on the clip below.
[Video cannot be uploaded here, but it is available in the original article, here.]
Meanwhile, in Gaza itself today the Israel Defence Forces killed 21 Hamas operatives who opened fire from the entrance to Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City where the terrorists were embedded within a group of civilians. Times of Israel reports:
Amid the exchange of fire, the IDF says civilians were seen leaving the hospital, and other operatives came out of adjacent buildings and hid among them to attack the Israeli forces. After firing RPGs at troops, the IDF says the operatives fled back into the hospital.
And in news that’s still unfolding at time of writing, IDF Chief Spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari has revealed the discovery of an underground Hamas command centre beneath Gaza’s Rantisi children’s hospital which not only contained suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades and a variety of weapons but also signs, such as baby bottles, that Hamas had held Israeli hostages there. He said there was evidence and independent separate intelligence that Hamas terrorists had returned directly to the hospital after their attacks and mass murders of Israelis on October 7.
All this might come as a surprise to one of the presenters on BBC Radio’s flagship Today programme, Mishal Husain. This morning’s show was another outstanding example of the contribution made by the BBC to the current climate in Britain of reasoned, informed and civilised debate that was so vividly illustrated on London’s streets last Saturday and ever since the Hamas pogrom in Israel on October 7.
Husain was interviewing a junior defence minister, James Heappey. If you can access BBC Sounds, you can listen here at around two hours 10 minutes in. She told him :
You say “Palestinian people stuck in Gaza”. They are being bombed. For the past two days we’ve not had an update from the health ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas; the last figures we have from two days ago stand at more than 11,000 deaths, many of them women and children…
Will we [the UK] ever be calling for a ceasefire or will we be entirely dependent on when the Israeli government decides to stop? The Americans have said too many Palestinians have died in Gaza.
Heappey demurred, replying that calling for a ceasefire would be to demand that Israel end a military campaign in response to the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust; but the UK government had impressed on Israel the need to put protections for civilians in place. At this, Husain interrupted him to say:
But do you think they do? Do you think they do?
She then referred to a number of uncompromising and bullish remarks by Israeli politicians about the wider Gaza population, demanding:
Does that strike you as a legitimate way to run an operation?
Heappey replied that it did not, but that under international law a state had the right to defend itself and there were “protections for certain locations”. Husain, becoming increasingly agitated, interrupted him again to say:
But are those being borne out …when we’ve got at least 11,000 people killed in the last five weeks in Gaza?
Heappey then observed that Hamas situated its military infrastructure underneath schools, places of worship and hospitals, a practice that “does waive their protection”. Once again Husain interrupted him to protest:
But do you know for sure? I know the IDF are sure that there is a military command centre under the Al Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. Do you know that to be the case? Because I asked our correspondent there earlier today, and he said, having gone to this particular hospital for years — indeed he was born there —he’s never seen any military capability. And Hamas are willing for there to be an independent body to go in and look at that complex.
Oh dear. The BBC correspondent said he’d seen no military capacity in the hospital, eh? That settled the matter, did it? And Hamas would provide access to an “independent body” to inspect, would it? This was an insult to the listener’s intelligence.
The two main points Husain was making concerned the number of Gazans who had been killed and the claim of a military nerve centre under Al Shifa. On the first, she repeated the Hamas line that 11,000 Gazans had been killed and she appeared to assume these were all civilians.
Does it not occur to her — or to the myriad other journalists in Britain and the US parroting the same Hamas line — to wonder at the fact that Hamas have never acknowledged one single terrorist among the number of dead Gazans? Is it really likely that there have been none at all? The Israelis say they have killed thousands of Hamas operatives. Yet the BBC and other outlets trot out the Hamas statistics as if these are all civilians.
The patent absurdity of the Hamas numbers lie is analysed here by Professor Kobi Michael for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. A copy should be sent to every western newsdesk (and to the US State Department, which also seems to have fallen for it). Michael observes:
No-one questioned how PMH [Palestinian Ministry of Health] reported 30,000 Palestinians wounded when the total number of hospital beds in all medical facilities in Gaza, including UNRWA clinics, did not exceed 3,000. So, where exactly are all the 30,000 wounded? According to PMH reports, there are already more than 13,000 Palestinians dead. If that casualty number is accurate, where were they buried?…
At least half of the number of dead and wounded are probably Hamas members, whether armed terrorists, whose identity is disguised as civilians by Hamas, or members of the Hamas establishment. A significant number of the “children” reported as killed or wounded are young people aged 13-18, who were in Hamas facilities or even took an active part in the fighting…
From the remaining number, a significant number of Palestinian dead and injured resulting from nearly 1,000 failed rocket launches that landed short must be subtracted, such as the one that fell on the Al-Ahali hospital. From the remainder one must subtract all the Palestinians who fled northern Gaza for the safe zone in the south and who were killed by Hamas.
The main points of all that have been obvious from the start to any fair-minded person. So why are no journalists prepared at least to ask the relevant questions about the patently dishonest Hamas numbers?
On the question of the military nerve centre under Al Shifa hospital, there is a wealth of evidence going back many years.
There’s this from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre:
William Booth wrote in the Washington Post on July 15, 2014, that :“At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, crowds gathered to throw shoes and eggs at the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, who represents the crumbling ‘unity government’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The minister was turned away before he reached the hospital, which has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices” (ITIC emphasis). Washington Post correspondent Nick Casey Tweeted that Hamas used the Al-Shifa Hospital as a “safe place” to meet with the media.
Or this from the Foundation for Defence of Democracies:
In 2007, a doctor in Shifa Hospital said, “The medical staff are suffering from fear and terror, particularly of the Hamas fighters, who are in every corner of the hospital.” Former Israeli intelligence chief Avi Dichter said in 2009 that Hamas commanders even at times wear doctor’s robes. The same year, PBS said it “reached a doctor in Gaza who believes Hamas officials are hiding either in the basement or in a separate underground area underneath the hospital”. By 2014, the hospital had become a “de-facto” command centre for Hamas.
Or this further FDD report:
The specifics have been revealed in a steady drip of open-source information dating back to 2006, when a PBS documentary showed Hamas fighters roaming Shifa’s halls, intimidating staff, and denying access to parts of the hospital. The following year, according to Human Rights Watch, Hamas fired at its rival group Fatah from within the Shifa hospital compound during a Palestinian civil war. As one doctor said, “the medical staff are suffering from fear and terror, particularly of the Hamas fighters, who are in every corner of the hospital”.
Journalists have revealed the use of the hospital by Hamas over the years. One foreign journalist said Hamas’s use of Shifa is an open secret, but reporters in Gaza are refuse to report about it out of fear for their personal safety.
Then there are all the individual testimonies. MEMRI has reported:
Dirar Belhoul Al-Falasi, a member of the UAE’s Federal National Council, said in an October 13, 2020 interview on Kwait’s Diwan Al-Mulla Online TV: “People from the Red Crescent told us that they built a hospital [in Gaza]… This hospital was for treating Palestinians. People from Hamas fired a rocket from the hospital’s roof, so that Israel would bomb this hospital. Just see how low they can go…”
On Al-Jazeera during the 2014 round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, American-Egyptian writer Magdi Khalil asked:
Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide in Al-Shifa Hospital, thus risking the lives of regular people? Is this the moral high ground? They are fleeing like rats, hiding behind patients in Gaza hospitals. Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide behind these patients? They garner sympathy over the corpses of children. This is part of the strategy of the Islamists. They consider sympathy garnered over the corpses of children to be a victory…
Here is al Jazeera showing Hamas terrorists inside Gaza’s Indonesia hospital. Hamas terrorists themselves have confirmed the practice, as here.
And yesterday the US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said:
Hamas is using hospitals as it uses many other civilian facilities, for command and control, for weapons storage, to house its fighters and this is a violation of the laws of war.
Mishal Husein could have used all of this material to educate herself. Instead, she relied on a BBC correspondent from Gaza who said he had never seen anything.
Isn’t the BBC a stunning credit to journalism?
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