Fifteen prominent public health professionals and current and past deans of the country’s schools of public health have denounced statements by retired general Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council and then a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), for writing an opinion article in Yedioth Aharonoth on November 19 that argued that Israel should let Gaza be destroyed by letting go wild.
Eiland asserted that the Gazan civilian population at large including the wives and other family members of Hamas terrorists welcomed the takeover of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian population there is not divided into two – terrorists and “innocent civilians who are suffering at no fault of their own,” he argued.
In fact, most of the residents welcomed the rule of Hamas and supported its ideology of wiping out Israel. “Gaza is very much like Nazi Germany and underwent a similar process, so it’s correct for Israel to carry out the war accordingly. Gaza women are the mothers, sisters, and spouses of Hamas murderers…Epidemics in the South [of Gaza] will bring victory closer and will decrease casualties among IDF soldiers.”
How to combat Hamas
The retired general wrote that the way to bring the collapse of Hamas is not only to kill more terrorists while preventing a humanitarian catastrophe; epidemics in the south will bring about a faster victory over Hamas, he continued.
“This is not cruelty for its own sake of the enemy as an end but as a means. The suffering can end if Hamas surrenders. There is no reason why the Hamas leaders won’t surrender if the population lacks water and fuel and epidemics come and endanger their family members. As long as Israeli captives are held, don’t speak to us about humanitarian aspects,” he wrote.
The public health academics and physicians strongly opposed the general’s views, declaring that “we firmly assert our commitment to preserving the health of all civilian populations, even in time of conflict. This moral stance is both our conviction and our strength… General Eiland’s statements are strategically, medically, and morally wrong and do not reflect the sentiments of the majority of Israeli people.
Uniting against Hamas
Our nation is united in considering Hamas its enemy because of its charter pledged to the destruction of Israel and the unprecedented horrors it committed on October 7, including mass murder, rape, kidnappings, and torture.
Our allies throughout the world support us because of their revulsion to Hamas and its acts. If Israel makes the creation of a humanitarian crisis a deliberate weapon of war, our unity will be lost, and these supporters will be lost, because we will have made ourselves equivalent to Hamas.”
The physicians continued that “our enemies abroad have wrongly accused us of genocidal intentions. If epidemic disease were to break out in southern Gaza the world will surely blame Israel, not Hamas. We are confident that these are not the intentions of the IDF, the government or the Israeli people. General Eiland’s statement places him among a destructive minority among our people, and they are harmful to us. Moreover, they endanger Jews throughout the world, reinforcing the worst Jewish stereotypes, as poisoners of wells and so on.”
While protecting our soldiers is an important goal, “it cannot supersede other moral imperatives. Weaponizing health issues, as General Eiland suggests doing, is wrong. This war has seen attacks on health facilities (largely unreported when they occur in Israel), deaths of healthcare workers on both sides, disruptions of health services, and worse, Hamas’ use of patients as human shields and the use of Gazan hospitals as bases and cover for terrorist activities. Suggesting that epidemics, which endanger the civilian population, the abductees, as well as soldiers, as a legitimate military tactic cannot be regarded as acceptable ‘advice’ – even from a retired general with years of field and intelligence experience.
The dangers of epidemics
They accused Eiland of writing mistaken “facts.” Epidemics, they wrote, “know no boundaries and risk national and global health security. Epidemics have not only wiped out civilian populations in wartime; they have also decimated armies and stopped them in their tracks, making ‘victory’ impossible.
This was true of Napoleon in Russia, stopped by typhus, dysentery, and diphtheria; George Washington’s troops who failed to take Quebec, in Canada, as they were stopped by smallpox; and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the American Civil War, killed by disease.”
Eiland is “evidently unfamiliar with, or chooses to ignore Napoleon, who after retreating from Acre, in our part of the world, said, ‘Our spies, deserters, and our prisoners all reported that plague was ravaging the city. . . If the soldiers had entered the city . . . they would have brought back into camp the germs of that horrible evil, which is more to be feared than all the armies in the world.’ ”
As professionals devoted to preventing disease and preserving health everywhere and for all peoples, “we vociferously object to this statement and demand that General Eiland retract it, and more importantly, newspaper editors and responsible Israeli leaders publicly reject it and its sentiments. In the end, two peoples share this land, as well as its pathogens, and will continue to do so. Both will have to strive for a safe and healthy future for our children and future generations,” they concluded.