I spent several hours on Wednesday night wrestling over how we could best cover the raid by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. My initial plan was to get an expert in international law to write a piece about the legality of such a raid under the various conventions that set out the rules of war.
Article 13 of protocols added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, which deals with the “discontinuance of protection of civilian medical units”, sets out that in certain circumstances hospitals and other medical units can be considered military targets – if, for example, they are being used to shelter combatants or store weapons or are being used as a command and control centre.
But crucially, if the weapons are small arms taken from wounded soldiers and not yet removed from the hospital they don’t count. Hospitals are allowed to have armed guards or sentries and medical personnel are allowed to have small arms for their own protection and for that of their patients.
