The Gaza Doctrine

 

 

 

Over the course of two years, Israeli forces systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health system. Their attacks in Iran and Lebanon follow a disturbingly similar pattern.  

"Since the start of Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, critics have charged that Israel is expanding its Gaza doctrine—a combination of mass displacement, mass killing, and mass destruction of civilian infrastructure—to other parts of the Middle East. (In some sense this is a return of “the Dahiyeh doctrine,” named after the neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs that the Israeli military ruthlessly pummelled during the 2006 Lebanon War—only in Gaza the destruction was not confined to a specific area and the people living within it but became the military’s modus operandi throughout the territory.) Israel, surprisingly or not, has embraced the accusation, dropping leaflets on Beirut reminding the city’s residents of the Israeli military’s “great success in Gaza.” One of the more pronounced features of the Gaza doctrine—and of contemporary warfare more generally—is turning life-saving medical sites like hospitals, health clinics, and ambulances into targets: it was the “deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems” that Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) cited to argue that the Israeli military’s conduct in the Strip met the legal definition of genocide. The reports emerging out of Iran and Lebanon raise the deeply troubling prospect that Israel hopes to replicate that “success” abroad."

read article by NEVE GORDON