How Israel just lost the war ... to a Palestinian hospital!

Over the past few days and weeks, Israel has been trying to convince the world of the narrative that Palestinian hospitals in Gaza are nothing but bases for Hamas. They suggested that they were launching pads to rockets, had underground tunnels, housed fighters, were command and control centers, and were even likely to be where many abducted Israelis were being held.

As a result, they argued that they were justified to intentionally and freely bomb any hospitals, deny them water, electricity, and fuel, in what has been described as a first in modern warfare. Unfortunately, much of the so-called civilized world's leaders appear to have  bought the story and watched on, denying albeit a temporary ceasefire.

It would all come to a head with Israel facing off against Al Shifa hospital, the oldest and grandest of Gazan hospitals. The hospital is in fact older than the State of Israel itself having been founded in 1946, and it is formed of a large multi-edifice complex with a large courtyard in the middle.

In the past few days, Al Shifa received multiple warnings and was fired upon on multiple occasions, with the _New York Times_ confirming that the attack last week was of a projectile that was indeed Israeli, into the complex courtyard, which they knew was now housing civilians seeking shelter from all the indiscriminate bombings. The explosion was filmed and it caused the injury of several among which was a young victim, who was pictured with a severed leg screaming in agony.

Israel's war on Al Shifa continued and it soon encircled the hospital announcing to the Israeli public that the grand prize was within reach. Interestingly, the grand prize was no longer the elimination of Hamas or any other such fanciful project. It was the taking of Al Shifa!

The siege would last days and the warnings flew as often as the bombs, with Israel suggesting everyone inside flee. Those inside, including doctors, nurses, and staff refused to leave their patients behind. Newspaper pictures that beamed across the world help explain why: The hospital wards were full of patients, being treated, notwithstanding the severe shortages of medical supplies, electricity, oxygen, and water.

One specific ward shocked the world. It was the children's ward with multiple newborn babies, four of whom, it was reported, had been recently extracted from the wombs of their deceased mothers in emergency cesarian acts to save them. They were pictured trying to catch a breath in a world gone inhumanely mad around them, not even showing them an inkling of mercy. How they must wish to have never been born or to be dead along with their mothers?

Israel's media war reached a frenzy, expecting a climax with the entry of the Israeli army into the hospital on Wednesday, November 15th, following a barrage of meaningless statements, such as precise targeting and the like that meant nothing to the lifeless, limbless, and soulless ... In went the army, warning the hospital chief and doctors once more to leave. They refused. The Israelis  started searching the hospital, and searching, and searching ... only to find that there was no armed presence, no tunnels, no prisoners. Only the death, destruction, and misery they had caused.

In Al Shifa, they did find something else, which they will be hard pressed to deny. Defiance! The hospital defied the entire might of the Israeli army, continued with its mission and laid bare for the entire world to see the unbridled and naked aggression of the Israeli army on civilians, even those who had taken shelter within the hospital.

Desperate to find something, the Israeli army might be drawn to find a tunnel here or there. With 500 Kms of them crisscrossing the Gaza strip's 360 KM2, any high schooler could have told them that it means it is highly probable that every square kilometer would have one or two kilometers worth of tunneling underneath, most without anyone's knowledge, not even evidently the Israeli intelligence, which seemingly remains clueless.

 The war will likely come to a stop soon as it must, with Israel having achieved little if any political objectives: Hamas is still standing, the abductees are still at large, and the rockets never ceased flying into Israel. While the future remains unclear, what is indeed clear is that Israeli policies of demonizing the Palestinians have fallen flat, and people throughout the whole world have come to recognize it through protests from Australia to California and everywhere in between.

Israel has been stood up by a defiant Palestinian hospital.  Without the firing of a single bullet, Al Shifa has shot down the Israeli hypothesis that the Palestinians were all criminally complicit in their crime against Israel, deserving such collective punishment. The indiscriminate civilian bombing, ad hoc destruction of schools, hospitals, and religious sites have all lost their justification; and it is now up to the world to hold the Israelis responsible for these crimes to account, just as the Jews themselves once did to those who perpetrated crimes against their own during WW2.