Israel bombed & destroyed 4000 embryos in Gaza. Were they ‘Hamas supporters’ too?
By Noa Limone • Translated by Sol Salbe
When a tank shell hit Gaza’s main fertility clinic in December 2023, 4000 embryos were destroyed in an instant, according to a UN report published last week. The report says that the building in which the clinic was located was detached, and a large sign indicated that it was a fertility clinic. The IDF said that they were not aware of the attack and that it was not intentional. The committee that investigated the matter found no evidence that the building was used for military purposes. In other words, the bombing cannot be justified by the usual arguments that missiles were fired from the building, that terrorists were hiding there, that weapons were stored in it, and that there were tunnel shafts in it.
In Israel, as expected, everyone automatically rejected the report — the Coalition, the Opposition and the mainstream media. We finally achieved unity in our divided country. People from all walks of life treated the report as a discrete antisemitic mass, with no single clause, paragraph or line worthy of examination, verification or refutation.
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One can comprehend some of the resentment aroused by the report given the procrastination and hesitation of the United Nations and international women’s organisations regarding the accusations of sexual crimes against Israeli women and abductees by Hamas on October 7. But this does not justify a sweeping disavowal of the report, certainly not when some of the details were also documented by IDF soldiers themselves and were on the record for all to see. In addition, a significant part of the document deals with Israel’s harm to all aspects of fertility in the Gaza Strip, including, in addition to direct attacks on fertility clinics, attacks on maternity wards in hospitals, the effects of lack of sanitary conditions, lack of access and shortages of medical equipment, electricity, and fuel on the treatment of pregnant women, new mothers, and newborns, the effects of hunger on lactating women, and more.
Most Israelis are indifferent to the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip, and sometimes their indifference is even accompanied by denial, as Moshe Ya’alon found out from the attack on him following his statement, “I expect that Israel will not send its soldiers to kill babies in Gaza.” Therefore, it seems ridiculous to expect any emotional reaction to the destruction of the embryos. But these thousands of embryos, which faded away with a single shell blast, were the product of gruelling fertility treatments that women have undergone. They are hopes that have been dashed, dreams that have been shattered and lost. Of all countries, this apathy is astonishing in Israel, which holds all sorts of fertility and birth rates records, where fertility treatments are so common. Just compare this indifference, for example, to the justified emotional storm caused by the embryo mix-up in the Assuta affair, which was decided by the Supreme Court last week.
The decision to accept the appeal of Sofia’s birth parents reignited the debate about the girl’s fate, when it was clear to everyone that any decision regarding her involved injustice to one of the parties. Even those who are convinced that it is in Sofia’s best interest to remain with her raising parents and with the mother who carried her in her womb and gave birth to her is familiar with the enormous difficulty and harm to the genetic parents, who were robbed of the chance of implantation through a disastrous mix-up which wasn’t their fault. So what about the thousands of potential parents who were treated every month at the fertility clinic that Israel destroyed in Gaza? Or perhaps in the eyes of the Israelis, for whom there are no uninvolved people in Gaza, these embryos were also Hamas supporters?
