An apparent Israeli air strike on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City has reportedly left over five hundred people dead.
“By enabling Israel’s ‘brutality’, the U.S. is ultimately responsible for the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has declared. Haniyeh said that the bombing would ‘constitute a turning point’ in his group’s struggle against the Jewish state.
‘The Americans who gave unlimited cover bear responsibility for the Baptist [Hospital] massacre. Whoever supports Israel is responsible for its violations in Gaza’, he said in a televised statement on Tuesday night.
‘The hospital massacre confirms the enemy’s brutality and the extent of his feeling of defeat’, Haniyeh continued, adding that ‘this massacre will constitute a turning point and a flood added to the flood of Al-Aqsa’, referring to the name of Hamas’ ongoing operation against Israel.
The Christian-run Al-Ahli Hospital, also known as the Baptist Hospital, was destroyed in an apparent missile strike on Tuesday. Palestinian officials accused Israel of targeting the facility, while Israel blamed the blast on a wayward rocket fired by the Islamic Jihad militant group, despite a government spokesman seemingly taking responsibility immediately after the strike.
Some 471 Palestinians were killed and more than 314 wounded in the strike, the Palestinian Health Ministry stated on Wednesday, calling the attack ‘an Israeli massacre’.
At the time of the strike, Israeli warplanes had been conducting continuous airstrikes on Gaza for over a week. Throughout this time, American officials have expressed solidarity with Israel and pledged increased military aid to the Jewish state.
Amid condemnation from Arab governments, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared on Wednesday that the ‘final responsibility’ for the ‘war crime’ at the hospital ‘lies with those who cynically make money from wars… With those who thoughtlessly distribute colossal amounts of money for weapons to load its military-industrial complex with work and falsely proclaim their global mission to protect democratic values. The United States of America’”. -RT
It comes as no surprise that the Western news media would conveniently neglect to report that the hospital bombed was a Christian one that had been functioning as a community clinic run by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem of the Middle Eastern branch of the Anglican Church, considering how many Americans would renounce their support for sending weapons to the Israeli regime if they knew it could culminate in the destruction of avowedly Christian institutions.