Culture Minister Miki Zohar declared on social media that “only the scum of the earth fires missiles at hospitalized children and elderly people in their sick beds”. The chair of Israel’s medical association, Zion Hagay, decried the strike as a war crime and urged the international medical community to condemn it.

This swift and unified condemnation by Israeli political and medical leadership underscores a striking contradiction: these same actors not only ignored but openly justified the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals over the past two years.

Israeli officials frame these hospitals as military targets and Hamas “shields”. Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, was placed under siege and then invaded, with the attack hailed by Israeli media as a victory.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Medical Association remained silent. In one of its rare statements after a year and a half of Israel’s repeated and targeted attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, the association echoed the state’s narrative, stating that health facilities and personnel must not be targeted “unless these are being used as a base for terrorist activities”.

This moment puts the international system to the test. While some medical and humanitarian groups have expressed concern, most international stakeholders have remained silent in the face of the destruction of Gaza’s entire health system.

Will medical journals, international associations and UN bodies respond to the attack on an Israeli hospital with the kind of swift condemnation and concrete actions they failed to take when hospitals in Gaza were bombed? The world should have acted when the first operating room was hit in Gaza. It should not take an Israeli facility being targeted for them to remember that hospitals are meant to be protected spaces.

If an attack on a hospital is a red line, this must be true for all hospitals, not just those serving Israelis. If international law is to mean anything, it must protect everyone, with the same standards applied to every violation. Anything less is not only hypocrisy; it is complicity.