https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20096/blood-libel-israel-gaza-hospital
This conflict is not about occupation or settlements. The chants of anti-Israel protesters, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — all of Israel — must be free of Jews.
The truth does not matter to bigots.
A document from the end of the 15th century features an illustration of a bearded Jew extracting the blood of a Christian child. The adjoining text explains that Jewish law requires that Passover matzoh be baked with the blood of Christian children.
Such documents were widely circulated through Europe during the Easter season and led to frequent pogroms — murder, rape, and destruction — against Jewish children, women and men in revenge for allegedly killing Christian children for their blood to make matzoh.
There was never any actual evidence of such cannibalism. In fact, Jewish law explicitly prohibits the consumption of any blood or its use in cooking.
The total lack of evidence, however, did not matter to those who were taught and believed what has come to be known as the “blood libel.” Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many believed that this falsehood was “true.”
This blood libel persisted throughout Europe into the early 20th century. Jews were put on trial and executed for supposedly killing Christian children for their blood.
Other libels against Jews formed the basis for classic antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi lies that dehumanized Jews to an extent that made the Holocaust possible. Following the murder of 6 million innocent Jews, including babies, the world said, “Never again” and antisemitism abated in many parts of the world.
Now it is back with a vengeance, accompanied by blood libels and other systematic lies about the Jewish people and their nation state, Israel.
It is against this sordid historical background that the current blood libel — that Israel targeted a Gaza hospital deliberately causing the death of 500 Muslim children, women and men — can best be understood and assessed.
There is absolutely no evidence that Israel struck the hospital, whether deliberately or accidentally. Evidence from videos, photographs and telephone intercepts have proved to intelligence agencies worldwide that a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel from near the hospital, almost certainly by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and that one of the rockets malfunctioned mid-flight, landing not directly on the hospital but in its outdoor parking lot, and that the explosion killed far fewer than 500 people.
The claim of 500 people killed came, within minutes of the PIJ rocket strike, from the “Gaza Ministry of Health” – in other words from Hamas. They lie. No facts or numbers are ever verifiable. Moreover, Hamas claims that no rocket parts survived – another self-serving lie. Yet, their blood libel is widely believed by Israel’s enemies – perhaps because they want to believe it. It is too good a story to be ruined by the facts. As the journalist Becket Adams wrote in National Review:
“The Media Will Never Forgive Israel for Not Bombing That Hospital…. Reporters and pundits mishandled the Gaza hospital story because they wanted so badly for it to be true.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:
“As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket ‘than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.'”
The “Muslim street” has been indoctrinated by its leaders to believe anything negative about Jews or Israel. And the Arab media generally reports Hamas lies and exaggerations — such as the claim that 500 civilians were killed at the hospital — as unvarnished truth.
