The Islamic regime in Tehran has for several days been threatening a “surprise” that the entire world would remember for centuries, only inviting ridicule when nothing earth-shaking transpired. Early on Thursday morning, however, Iran did deliver a missile strike against Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba, the principal hospital in the southern part of Israel. Seventy people were injured, the hospital suffered extensive damage, and now Israel’s defense minister has some words for Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday: "A dictator like Khamenei, who heads a country like Iran and has made the destruction of Israel his mission, cannot continue to exist. The IDF has been instructed and knows that in order to achieve all of its goals, this man absolutely should not continue to exist." Will Israel now act to take out Khamenei, who has ruled Iran with an iron fist since 1989?
It could happen. After all, U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday: “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding.” Trump added, however: “He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Whether or not the Israelis will feel similarly restrained at this point, however, is an open question.
The Iranian strike on Soroka Hospital, meanwhile, highlights the difference between the two principal countries that are involved in this conflict. The State of Israel, as maligned worldwide as it is, has focused its attacks upon Iran’s nuclear sites, refraining from targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Iran, in contrast, has focused its attacks on civilian areas in Israel, attempting to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah,” as the Qur’an directs (8:60).
Critics of Israel, however, have pointed to Israeli operations against hospitals in Gaza, claiming that when it struck Soroka Hospital, Iran was simply responding in kind. This claim founders on some facts that haters of Israel find inconvenient. In Gaza, Hamas has used hospitals as command-and-control centers, storing weapons and plotting jihad operations. The doctors and patients were only there so that if Israel discovered the Hamas headquarters and destroyed it, Hamas could tell the world, with help from the establishment media, that the remorseless Jews had dared to raise their hands against a hospital.
The establishment media was only too happy to help with this grand deception. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, reported in Feb. 2024 that “National Public Radio, with the founding mission ‘to create a more informed public,’ for months has kept from its 44 million weekly listeners the U.S. intelligence assessment that Hamas did indeed operate a command center in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital.”
CAMERA pointed out that NPR was still claiming that the Hamas activity in the hospital was only an unsubstantiated Israeli claim, despite the fact that “American intelligence services, based on independently collected intelligence, have concluded that Hamas ran a command center under the hospital.” The media watchdog pointed out that even the New York Times had broken ranks with its fellow leftist propagandists and reported that “the American intelligence assessment has remained firm that the hospital was used by Hamas,” and that “the complex was used by both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to command forces fighting against Israel, according to the intelligence.”
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Iran continued the jihadis’ pattern of deceit on Thursday, as another media watchdog, Honest Reporting, noted: “Despite clear evidence it was a hospital, Iranian regime supporters quickly spread lies online, claiming it was a military base. It wasn’t. The hospital treats all civilians. There were no weapons, no soldiers – only patients and doctors.”
Israel has, contrary to hysterical claims, scrupulously avoided civilian casualties throughout the war. British Colonel Richard Kemp, who has carefully studied the situation in Gaza, has said that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world.” Another military expert, West Point Professor John Spencer, has said that “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.” In the latest exchanges between Iran and Israel, the moral difference between the two sides has once again been shown in sharp relief.
