Dr. Adam Hamawy is a member of the Palestinian American Medical Association, and a plastic surgeon who on May 1 began working in Gaza at the European Hospital. After six weeks, he has recently returned home. The European Hospital has the greatest number of foreign doctors working – some intermittently —on its staff of any hospital in Gaza. Because of their presence, and of the media that reports on them, Hamas has taken care not to keep either combatants or weapons caches at the hospital; it is thus uniquely favored. But Dr. Hamawy appeared not to realize this when, in an NPR interview with Ari Shapiro, he implied that the IDF’s claims about the presence of Hamas operatives and weapons in hospitals in Gaza is false — a conclusion he reached only on the basis of working in the one hospital in Gaza where the IDF’s charges did not apply. Nor did the IDF ever accuse the staff of the European Hospital of collaborating with Hamas by allowing its men and weapons to be hidden there. But we have the evidence that In almost all of the other — more than two dozen— hospitals in Gaza, many did harbor Hamas combatants, some in the hospitals themselves, and some in tunnels under the hospitals that could be entered and exited through shafts in the hospital basements.
For a while, Dr. Hamawy was stuck in Gaza — he had not planned to spend six weeks — and he accused Israel of blocking his exit. But this was false. The Rafah crossing from Gaza into Egypt, which he used to enter Gaza and through which he expected to exit was, as he says, “blocked.” But he did not tell his NPR interviewer that it was “blocked” not by Israel, but by Egypt, and no doubt most of his audience, confused about what has been going on at the Rafah Crossing, assumed that when the doctor was “prevented from leaving,” this referred to those cruel Israelis who were blocking his way out. Nor did his callow interviewer, Ari Shapiro, follow up with the obvious question — “Who prevented you from leaving?” — possibly because he was too dumb to do so, or possibly because he knew that Adam Hamawy would not want to provide the truthful answer: Egypt.
Adam Hamawy was an army doctor in Iraq, where he treated, and helped save the life of, Tammy Duckworth, now a U.S. Senator. Hamawy is eager to turn her gratitude to him into support for the Palestinians, and has already told her his highly tendentious version of what he saw in Gaza. One hopes that she will be able to look beyond her personal gratitude and not be quick to accept that version.
Adam Hamawy says he has “never in my career witnessed the level of atrocities and targeting of my medical colleagues as I have in Gaza.”
“Hamawy told NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben [in an earlier interview when he was still in Gaza] that he and his colleagues were supposed to depart from Gaza on May 21, after just three weeks in the Strip — but were prevented from leaving. ‘We were told that our safe corridor had not been cleared, and that we were not supposed to leave the compound. If we did, it would be at our own risk, and we would be legitimate targets'” for Israel’s military.
On June 23, NPR carried an interview with Hamawy, but did not identify him as a member of the Palestinian American Medical Association. You can find the transcript here: “Surgeon who saved Sen. Duckworth says he couldn’t save her with those wounds in Gaza,” by Megan Lim, Justine Kenin, and Ari Shapiro, NPR, June 26, 2024:
…SHAPIRO: What did you want the staffers [on Capitol Hill] you met with today to understand about your experience in Gaza?
HAMAWY: I wanted them to see how severe it was. War is hell. This is what I’ve been hearing from everyone and on the news, and I understand that. I’ve seen it in the past. But this is beyond hell.
SHAPIRO: Beyond hell meaning what, exactly? You have enough experience in war to be able to draw a comparison.
HAMAWY: The level of civilian casualties is something that I’ve never seen before. The amount of resources we have to take care of them is something that I’ve never experienced before. And it’s on purpose. Usually, civilians are what’s called collateral damage, you know, a very bad term, but, you know, they’re not the targets. Here we could see, you know, consistently that they are the targets. And consistently, resources like medical aid, food, supplies is being withheld on purpose, which also impacts their care and their survival….
No, Hamawy is wrong. It is outrageous for him to claim that ”here [at the European Hospital] we could see, you know, consistently that [civilians] are the targets.” Civilians are wounded, civilians die, in every war. But the IDF does not anywhere deliberately treat civilians as “targets,” as do Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis. The IDF is conducting urban warfare in one of the most densely populated places on earth. Hamas has a longstanding practice of hiding its men, weapons, and rocket launchers within civilian neighborhoods, using those civilians as human shields. Hamawy does not mention this. Nor does he mention all the ways that the IDF attempts to minimize civilian casualties. Surely Adam Hamawy knows that the IDF always tries to warn civilians away from areas (cities, neighborhoods) that are soon to be targeted, and does the same with civilian buildings — schools, mosques, apartment buildings — where Hamas has been operating and consequently, are also out to be targeted, even though such warnings often alerts Hamas operatives as well. Just through March, the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent 16 million text messages, made 15 million robocalls, and 100,000 personal phone calls to warn civilians.
And the upshot of these warnings is that the IDF has attained the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in the history of modern warfare. The UN reports that in all the wars since 1945 the average civilian-to-combatant ratio has been 9:1 — that is, nine civilians killed for every combatant. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to reduce that ratio to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But in the Gaza war the IDF has managed to bring that ratio down to the unheard-of 1:1 — that is, one civilian killed for each combatant death. No wonder that Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded the British forces in Afghanistan, has described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.” And Professor John Spencer, who teaches urban warfare at West Point, says that the IDF has “taken more precautions to save civilian lives than any other army in the history of warfare.”
Rufolino says
Is this a surprise ?