Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph – The Red Cross has turned its back on Israel:

The UN we know about. Many of its member states are autocratic, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that they would side against the only democracy in the Middle East. Our expectations of the self-regarding EU are also not high. But the International Committee of the Red Cross? Not only does it have a humanitarian mandate but it was set up by the Geneva conventions and is based in neutral Switzerland. Even-handed, surely.

Sadly, as with other supranational institutions and NGOs, the Red Cross appears to have something of an Israelophobia problem. This week, 84-year-old hostage Elma Avraham was released by Hamas. She was found with a fever and a dangerously low heart rate. In a scathing interview, her daughter, Tal, said the Red Cross had refused to take medicine for her mother even when it was brought to a meeting with them. This wasn’t an isolated case. Weeks after the hostages had been seized, the Red Cross had failed to contact them….

Time and again, the organisation has pointed fingers at Israel while shrugging off the gross mistreatment of its citizens. Last month, it wrote a high-handed letter expressing potential concerns over the conditions in Israeli jails. Across the border, meanwhile, hundreds of innocent babies, women, disabled people and Holocaust survivors were being held in terrible conditions by captors who did not even bother with the pretence of upholding international law.

It felt like a symbolic moment. People began to ask questions about why the Red Cross, which had sent missions to the al-Shifa Hospital, was not doing more to confront Hamas.

We've been here before.

In 2015, the Red Cross’s president admitted that the organisation had turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. “It failed as a humanitarian organisation,” Peter Maurer said in a speech. “It had failed to understand the uniqueness of the inhumanity by responding to the outrageous with standard procedures; it had looked on helplessly and silently, not really trying – certainly not hard enough – to live up to the principle of humanity.”

The Red Cross, he concluded, had “lost its moral compass”. His words ring loudly today.