Russia is attacking hospitals in Ukraine. Israel is doing the same in the Gaza Strip.

During a Nations At this week’s Security Council meeting, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield strongly condemned the Russian bombing of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital on Monday, part of a Russian bombing campaign that has killed more than 30 Ukrainian civilians.

“We are here today because Russia … attacked a children’s hospital,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Just saying that sentence sends shivers down my spine.”

Thomas-Greenfield went on to list a series of Russian attacks on other Ukrainian hospitals during the war. She described Russian aggression as a “terror campaign” and called the attacks on civilian infrastructure a violation of international law. Representatives of other countries, such as Britain and France, echoed Thomas-Greenfield’s criticism. (The Russian ambassador denied responsibility for Monday’s bombing.)

The moral clarity of her comments impressed observers and international law experts, who contrasted them with the rhetoric and actions of the United States toward Israel. The United States has stood by Israel militarily and diplomatically as it has continuously attacked civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools in Gaza since October 7 in a brutal campaign that the International Court of Justice has classified as plausible genocide.

“I’m very happy that the United States is speaking out and condemning all of these actions so loudly,” Jessica Peake, a professor of international law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said of Thomas-Greenfield’s comments on Russia. “But at the same time, we’re not going to be anywhere near as harsh when it comes to Palestinian hospitals, Palestinian schools or Palestinian children.”

A very stark difference

The UN Security Council’s near-unanimous criticism of Russia this week echoed another moment from earlier this year – with one stark difference: the US response.

The council met on April 5, just days after Israel bombed a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen and after the end of Israel’s siege of Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, in which the Israeli military killed 400 Palestinians. Council members took turns condemning the attacks, calling on Israel to better protect aid workers and civilian infrastructure, and calling the attacks “clear violations of international humanitarian law.”

The US joined the calls for protection for aid workers. However, it refrained from criticising the attack on Al-Shifa Hospital and instead blamed Hamas. “We cannot ignore how Hamas’ actions have put humanitarian workers at risk,” said US Ambassador Robert Wood. “Building tunnels under hospitals and storing weapons in them is a violation of the laws of war and we condemn it.”

The United States’ differing and inconsistent responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have long been a point of criticism among those working for peace in both contexts.

Nate Evans, a spokesman for Thomas-Greenfield, told The Intercept that the ambassador has “condemned the loss of Palestinian civilians many, many times in the Security Council,” adding that the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are “two very different wars.” Evans noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” while Israel launched its attack in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller similarly contrasted the two wars on Monday, claiming that the Ukrainian military “does not have headquarters in hospitals, under hospitals, in other civilian sites, in residential buildings,” but accused Hamas of doing so. The US has repeatedly repeated Israel’s claim that Hamas uses hospitals for military operations, a claim for which neither party has provided credible evidence. Israel’s war has decimated Gaza’s medical sector, killing more than 200 medical and humanitarian workers, the highest number ever recorded in a conflict in a single year, according to the UN.

In fact, there are significant differences between the circumstances in which the two wars took place. For example, Russia has long been an adversary of the United States, while Israel is one of its closest allies and receives billions of dollars in military aid every year.

However, there are also clear parallels in terms of human rights violations and violations of international law in the respective wars, said Peake, describing the US government’s handling of the conflicts as “hypocritical”.

“What we’re seeing in the United States is a stark difference in the way it deals with its commitment to ending these conflicts,” said Peake, who is also deputy director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA.

“On the one hand, in Russia and Ukraine, the United States plays a very central role in international efforts to end the conflict and take responsibility,” she said. “And in the case of Gaza, they block resolutions and water down statements from UN bodies. The United States tries to water down those statements so that Israel appears to be a more reasonable party.”

Hiding behind diplomacy

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the US has vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions that would have called for a humanitarian pause or an immediate ceasefire. In contrast, the US has supported similar peace resolutions for Ukraine, many of which were vetoed by Russia.

In March, the Security Council managed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, but the United States abstained because “certain important amendments were ignored,” such as the call to add a condemnation of Hamas, Thomas-Greenfield said at the time.

US officials have said they oppose ceasefire resolutions because they do not recognize Israel’s obvious right to self-defense and that diplomatic approaches are more effective than public rebukes. And the US continues to point to its leading role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as proof that it is serious about ending the Gaza conflict.

But as negotiations continue, Israel is stepping up its bombings in the Gaza Strip, most recently focusing on Gaza City, where Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of Palestinian civilians on Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed – an unrealistic condition.

Israeli strikes have killed dozens of people this week, including a school near Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, where reports citing Palestinian medics said at least 27 people, mostly women and children, were killed. And over the weekend, separate Israeli attacks on other schools in Gaza City and a UN-run school in Nuseirat killed 20 more people. Strikes also hit a house in Deir al-Balah, which was in Israel’s “humanitarian security zone” from which Palestinians were supposed to flee, the Associated Press reported.

The US has not yet condemned the latest wave of attacks. However, on Wednesday the Biden administration agreed to send hundreds of 500-pound bombs to Israel, AP reported. The US had already held back the munitions in May as Israel prepared to attack Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were sheltering.

“It is simply not enough to say ‘we are trying to be diplomatic’ when it comes to civilian casualties, especially when it involves nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population,” Peake said, citing a recent report by the Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, which puts the death toll in Gaza at 186,000, according to a “conservative estimate.”

“If Biden had called Netanyahu this afternoon and said, ‘We’re stopping your arms supply,’ that would have ended the conflict,” Peake said. “If the United States said, ‘We’re stopping funding Israel until there’s a ceasefire,’ that would have ended the conflict.”