Colin Sheridan: Inevitable slaughter follows every accusation made by Israel

Imagine a medic trying to access children under rubble, with no light or electricity to guide you? Israel bombs in the dead of night for that very reason

Air strikes destroyed several buildings facing the Rafik Hariri University Hospital, located on the outskirts of southern Beirut. Picture: AP Photo/Bilal Hussein

 Every accusation is a confession, and a prelude to inevitable slaughter. 

On Monday, Israel accused Hezbollah of keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold in a bunker underneath Al Sahel hospital in Beirut. I’m deliberately not saying what part of Beirut, because, by now we should all realise that the coordianates do not matter. It never did. Beirut is Beirut. 

Its demography is irrelevant, except to those who excuse (and report) Israel's “rooting out” of its enemies as some sort of well-thought-out, humane pest-control. By that rationale, its enemies include Lebanese schoolchildren, Palestinian newborns, doctors, nurses, first responders, peacekeepers, journalists, kindergarten teachers, geriatrics, the disabled community, migrant workers, and kittens.

Not long after floating the accusation, Israel bombed in the vicinity of Rafik Hariri University Hospital, the largest public hospital in Lebanon. I always remember this hospital because its where my colleague brought her dying son the night of the Beirut blast. Where the doctors and nurses bravely fought to keep him alive. Because that what hospitals do. Try to keep people alive. 

The death toll currently stands at eighteen, four children amongst them. At the same time emergency services searched through the wreckage well into Tuesday afternoon, Israel struck again, flattening a high-rise residential building in the centre of the city. Wednesday brought with it the bombardment of Tyre, the ancient coastal city so rich in culture and history it defies description. 

With scores seriously injured, the number of dead will inevitably rise long after the world's gaze shifts to the next airstrike in Gaza, or the south. Or the north, for that matter. Nowhere, now, is safe in Beirut and Lebanon, save for the super-rich Christian neighbourhoods and the ski-resorts whose chalets give refuge to the wealthy. Trust me, when they start getting hit, you know the game is well and truly up.

Much of the early reporting of the strike that hit in front of Rafik Hariri hospital described it as “Hezbollah run". It is not, but that shouldn’t really matter. 

Even if there was $1bn belonging to Nasrallah stashed in a triage station. It is a public hospital in a densely populated neighborhood in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, a sovereign country. And it was bombed by a military apparatus that boasts the most sophisticated targeting technology ever made, in the middle of the night to ensure maximum carnage. Imagine for a moment being a medic trying to access the children under the rubble, with no light or electricity to guide you? They bomb in the dead of night for that very reason.

Accusations

Google “Israel accuses…,” and here's a small sample of what that search will reveal: Israel accuses Al Jazeera. The ICJ. Israel accuses Albanese. Israel accuses UNRWA. China. Egypt. Spain. The BBC (no, really). Ireland. Unifil. South Africa. The World Health Organisation. Elmo. Soon, once it exhausts its hit-list of genocide scholars, courts, countries, and aid organisations, there’ll be nobody left to accuse of anything. Only itself. Working as it does under the cloak of impunity, it could do that and expect no sanction. Official Ireland, Palestine's champion in the west, continues to trade with Israel. On Tuesday, The Ditch reported that US Secretary of State Anthon Blinken was facilitated with a stopover at Shannon airport en route to Israel. 

As our troops bravely man the Blue Line, as Irish journalists and aid workers look pensively skyward in Beirut fearing the impact of another American-bought EU-built missile, our government talks fluently out both sides of its increasingly complicit mouth

Hours before Beirut was set alight on Monday night, reports appeared in Israel's most widely distributed newspaper Israel Hayom, that an operative captured during recent Israeli military ground operations in south Lebanon had “testified” to the IDF that Unifil had accepted bribes from Hezbollah in return for allowing the group access to UN posts. According to the daily, the IDF confirmed these claims, stating that Hezbollah also gained control of Unifil security cameras. No evidence was provided.

From little acorns great oaks grow. Or, in the case of Israel's strategic slandering and defaming of anyone who dares hold them accountable, from such tiny seeds of doubt will great slaughter follow. Before too long, there will be diagrams released from Tel Aviv describing how Unifil allegedley facilitate Hezbollah’s military activities to the tune of selling them weapons. Smuggling them rations. Sharing intelligence (the UN does not gather intelligence). The first dead peacekeeper will be found and photographed by the IDF with “evidence" showing them with a Nasrallah tattoo on one arm, and “Death to the Great Satan” in Arabic on the other.

This is what they do.

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The majority of ordinary people, the ones with no political agenda or careers to advance, do not care where Nasrallah's millions are. They do not care about Hamas tunnels or Hezbollah dollars. Neither does international humanitarian law (the rules of war), for that matter, in the context of targeting civilians.

Of course, there is no denying the tunnels and millions exist, but, putting aside the very obvious question as to why they have to in the first place, most people watching images of traumatised parents collecting the body parts of their dismembered children in rotting plastic bags see Israel's “targeting” precisely for what it is.

Evil.