Though there were eminently practical reasons for the removal of 28 premature infants from a hospital in Gaza City to Egypt, perhaps some at least of the Evangelical supporters of Israel, the so-called Christian Zinionists, might have recalled the Bible story of the New Testament, when Christ was born as his parents fled Palestine for Egypt. According to the New Testament, Christ was thus born in the manger of an inn in Bethlehem in Palestine. As Christmas is not far off, there is a certain seasonal rightness about this. The New Testament relates, in the Gospel according to Matthew, how Joseph was fleeing the massacre of children ordered by the King of the Jews, Herod Antipas I, who was as much a client of the Romans as the present Israeli government is of the USA. Just as much as Herod, the Israeli armed forces are killing children not just by the indiscriminate nature of their bombardment, but by deliberately targeting hospitals.
The 28 babies sent across to Egypt were the 31 removed from Al-Shifa Hospital because Israeli forces had taken it over to search for a mythical Hamas command centre and for the much-vaunted Hamas tunnel system. Three babies are still at the Emirati Hospital in Gaza Cirt. The reasons for the babies’ removal seem to have been because the hospital incubators were being shut down as power outages grew more frequent, and with Israel targeting the hospital with artillery and withe serial attacks, it was going to lose its little patients anyway, so the doctors ran the risk of making the shift, which involved rushing them in ambulances to the Rafah crossing into Egypt, where teams with portable incubators awaited, into which the babies were put, Apart from the infants, their parents are also undergoing severe trauma.
Amid all this primal drama, the Qatar initiative to arrange a ceasefire seems to have fallen through because of Israeli intransigence. The deal would have seen a ceasefire for some days, perhaps four or five, followed by the release of some of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas during its attacks on October 7. This release would have been in exchange for the release of certain captive Palestinians. This, it seems, was the deal-breaker, as Israeli negotiators preferred to keep hold of those Palestinians rather than get their own people released.
