Hamas has a history of using ambulances for war
Before the facts had even settled, western media outlets rendered their verdict: Israel was guilty. Guilty of deliberately targeting ambulances. Guilty of murdering humanitarian workers. Guilty because in the court of international opinion, Israel’s guilt is the default setting.
Only later did the complicated reality emerge. Israeli forces near Rafah, acting on intelligence that Hamas operatives were exploiting ambulances for military purposes, opened fire on a suspicious convoy. People were killed, including members of the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence. But rather than approach the incident with caution and historical awareness, media outlets like the New York Times and Sky News rushed to enshrine a narrative of Israeli barbarism – a narrative that ignores both the nature of the enemy Israel faces and the battlefield Hamas has deliberately created.
For decades, Palestinian terrorist groups have systematically turned ambulances, hospitals, schools and mosques into instruments of war. This is not a rare abuse but an entrenched tactic: a strategic manipulation of international law designed to endanger civilians and maximise propaganda victories. During the Second Intifada, suicide bombers were smuggled through Israeli checkpoints in ambulances. In one infamous 2002 case, a bomb belt was hidden beneath a stretcher carrying a sick child. Captured Hamas fighters have confessed to using ambulances for ferrying weapons and personnel. Senior Hamas leadership shelters inside hospitals, exploiting legal protections meant for civilians.
Initial IDF investigations indicate that intelligence detected suspicious movement in an area recently active with Hamas convoys. It says six of the 15 killed were Hamas operatives. The accusation that Israel acts with wanton cruelty – striking ambulances for sport – is not just false, it is a profound inversion of moral reality. It is not the IDF that violates the sanctity of humanitarian symbols; it is Hamas, systematically destroying that trust, turning every ambulance into a potential weapon and every rescue worker into an unwitting shield.
The Fourth Geneva Convention protects medical transports and facilities – but that protection is conditional. When hospitals become command centres and ambulances become troop carriers, the immunity is forfeited by those who abuse it. No nation, under existential threat from enemies who have turned humanitarian infrastructure into a battlefield, could operate under a policy of blind trust. Israel’s soldiers must act in a reality where every ambulance could hide explosives, every hospital could shelter terrorists. Ignoring this reality is not just naïve – it is deeply immoral.
The media’s unwillingness to grapple with this reality – its eagerness to frame Israel as a pariah state while ignoring the profound legal and moral violations of its adversaries – is not an innocent error. It sustains the very cycle of violence it claims to lament. It emboldens those for whom civilian suffering is not a tragic cost but a deliberate weapon. It contributes directly to the perverse incentive structure whereby Palestinian armed groups are rewarded — politically and diplomatically — for placing civilians and humanitarian workers in the line of fire.
In Rafah, IDF forces engaged a convoy under conditions of extreme ambiguity, in a known combat zone, against an enemy that routinely hides behind humanitarian cover. Yet western media has stripped away all complexity, portraying Israel as gratuitously violent while erasing Palestinian violations of the laws of war.
Until the media holds Israel’s adversaries to the same moral standards it so eagerly imposes on Israel, it will not serve as a guardian of truth, but as an active participant in the cycle of violence it claims to condemn.
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