Thursday, June 11, 2026
Elder of ZiyonThroughout the Gaza war, UN officials treated Israeli charges that Hamas operates in hospitals as accusations to be rebuffed rather than investigated. In December 2023, the WHO representative for the Palestinian territories, Richard Peeperkorn, told reporters that "we on our missions have not seen anything of this on the ground" and that WHO was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used." When Israel's ambassador told the WHO executive board in January 2024 that the IDF had found evidence of Hamas military use in every hospital it searched, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dismissed the charges as "false claims" that "can endanger our staff," while UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, as Israeli forces entered Al-Shifa, posted that "hospitals are not battlegrounds" — a rebuke with only one intended address.
The UN was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used" only by ignoring its own files. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the 2008–2009 Gaza War — the Goldstone Report — found that Hamas targeted Fatah affiliates and supporters, using hospitals as sites for questioning, executions and body dumps. The UN commission of inquiry into the 2014 war found that Hamas forces tortured victims in Al-Shifa Hospital. The question of how Gaza's hospitals were being used had been asserted, twice, by the UN's own investigators — and every UN official who professed skepticism during the war had those findings available the entire time.
Western doctors who traveled to Gaza became the war's most quoted witnesses, and they held the line as well. Asked directly on PBS NewsHour in January 2024 whether she saw any evidence of militant activity in or around the hospitals, the International Rescue Committee's Dr. Seema Jilani answered: "I did not see any evidence to suggest that. And the IRC would never work in a hospital that would be used for those purposes." When 60 Minutes asked Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, an American physician who had just left the Nasser Medical Complex, whether she saw Hamas hiding or operating in the hospitals, she replied: "I can really just talk about what I know. And what I know is that the health care catastrophe in these hospitals, that's what I saw." The formulation deserves admiration for its craftsmanship — an answer engineered to sound like a denial while asserting nothing that could later be falsified.
Israel, meanwhile, kept producing evidence. It published video of weapons caches recovered inside Al-Shifa, and at Nasser its forces reported coming under rocket fire from the hospital premises and detaining hundreds of operatives, some dressed as medical staff, including participants in the October 7 massacre. Released hostages testified to being held captive inside Nasser, where troops also found mortars, grenades and Israeli vehicles stolen on October 7. Declassified American intelligence independently assessed that Hamas and Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa to command forces and hold hostages. The media response to this accumulating record was a Washington Post investigation concluding that the evidence was insufficient, alongside a genre of coverage that treated each Israeli disclosure as the latest unverified claim in an information war.
Israel's position was considered, by the UN, media and NGOs, to be presumed falsehood. Hamas denials, despite Hamas's documented history of using hospitals, were considered by the same sources to be presumed truth.
What would it take for the UN to admit that Hamas used hospitals in this war? The evidentiary bar is very, very high - Hamas has to publicly admit it. Mountains of evidence are worthless next to a single Hamas denial. I'm not exaggerating - this is the consistent pattern throughout the war in the media and NGOs.
However, Hamas has more recently been publishing videos of them enthusiastically torturing and executing suspected "collaborators," as a warning to others. Which means the UN can no longer deny what everyone knew and no one was willing to admit.
The result is the newest report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (A/HRC/62/22) — the same standing commission that last year accused Israel of genocide. On September 21, 2025, it finds, militants from the Qassam Brigades and Hamas's Rad'a Force publicly executed three men "in front of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City," blindfolded and bound, while a masked gunman announced to the crowd that "the death penalty has been decided against these traitors," after which the victims were "knocked to the ground and shot multiple times in the head and upper body" (para. 50). At Nasser Hospital, the Commission documents Hamas's plainclothes Sahm Unit conducting torture on the hospital grounds throughout 2024 and 2025: a man "tied up in a stress position (shabeh) and being forced to confess to illegally selling tobacco and severely beaten on his wrists, chest and arms with a metal pipe, while he screamed in pain" (para. 55); another pinned to the ground on the premises "while one militant repeatedly smashed a large cement brick on his legs and another hit his ankle with a metal pipe, likely fracturing it, amid his screams" (para. 56); a bound man kneecapped with three rifle shots "in an open area in front of the Nasser Medical Complex, in front of a crowd including at least three children" (para. 57). A witness described Hamas members beating victims inside the hospital and shooting a man in the cafeteria tent, an incident that "escalated into an attack by the victim's family on the emergency department, which was met by Hamas counterfire from inside the hospital"; on seven or eight occasions the witness "heard screams coming from the building" before masked Sahm-linked men exited it (para. 58). Hamas channels, the Commission adds, "instructed medical practitioners to withhold medical care from the victims" (para. 39).
The witnesses most celebrated by Western media were present for much of this. Doctors rotated through Nasser continuously, and MSF operated there continuously until suspending non-essential work on January 20, 2026 — yet the first public statement from an international medical organization about armed men in the hospital came on February 14, 2026, after the ceasefire, when MSF acknowledged that "its staff had observed armed and masked men in parts of the hospital complex, incidents of intimidations, arbitrary patient arrests and suspected movement of weapons within the hospital" (para. 59). Men were tortured in front of crowds on the hospital grounds, and the international medical presence found its voice only when the testimony could no longer complicate the wartime narrative.
Having been forced into these findings by Hamas's own publicity, the UN did everything possible to minimize them.
One passage shows exactly how desperately the UN wants to exonerate Hamas even in the face of so much evidence. Having concluded "on reasonable grounds that the Sahm Unit of Hamas has interrogated and mistreated Palestinian civilians in the Nasser Medical Complex," the Commission immediately adds: "It notes, however, that such conduct does not amount to 'acts harmful to the enemy', namely Israel. Therefore, the hospital would not have lost its protection under international humanitarian law and would not constitute a legitimate target for attacks" (para. 61) — a point it considered important enough to repeat in its legal conclusions (para. 87).
In other words, the UN is saying that even though Hamas admits to using the hospitals, there is no evidence that Hamas used them to attack Israel — the very thing Israel spent two years documenting. Therefore, Israel still had no reason to shoot back. Hamas hadn't released any videos of their fighters shooting with patriotic music, so it cannot possibly have happened, and the Jews are lying, as usual.
It is true that the evidence the UN uncovered doesn't mean Israel had the right to attack. But that is because the UN only uncovered the evidence Hamas handed them on its social media channels. Anything beyond that cannot be proven, and on the contrary, if Israel provided the video evidence, that is itself probably evidence that Israel fakes videos.
Whether Nasser was a legitimate Israeli target sits outside the Commission's mandate, and nobody asked the Commission to decide it. The Commission volunteered the ruling anyway, categorically, on a record that excludes the rocket fire from the premises, the weapons caches, the hostages and the October 7 operatives in scrubs — every piece of evidence that actually bears on the question. A verdict was rendered after excluding the entire case file, on a charge nobody brought in this proceeding, because the one implication the Commission needed to foreclose was the one that might vindicate two years of Israeli warnings.
A UN commission has now confirmed that Hamas used Gaza's two most famous hospitals for torture, executions and armed combat across eighteen years, and the confirmation arrived only because Hamas filmed it. It sandwiched these findings between complaints about settlers, wrapped in a causal theory the report's own text disproves, and accompanied by an unsolicited ruling that Israel still had no right to act on any of it. The officials who spent the war assuring the world there was nothing to see have issued no corrections, and on the UN's demonstrated standard of evidence, none should be expected until Hamas publicly brags about its war crimes.
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