A step towards peace in Gaza
The Palestinians in Gaza blame Israel and the United States for their misery and helplessness. Since its creation and the days of Moshe Dayan, Israel believes its survival as a state requires massive retaliation to any threat to its existence. Killing Israeli citizens and attacking Israel with rockets from Gaza are considered justification for massive retaliation. It is a vicious circle of ever-escalating violence. The ultimate conclusion will be a genocidal total war.
There is a way to break the vicious circle of terrorist attacks and massive retaliation. It is possible to create a climate for peaceful co-existence between the Palestinians and the Israeli people. The majority of each People want to live in peace.
The economic despair of the Palestinians must be addressed and resolved. Only Israel and the oil rich Muslim states can make that happen. It requires time to build infrastructure and then develop business and industry. But first the current public relations disaster that Israel has created must end. Israel must make peace possible.
The first step on the road to peace is for Israel to restore, rebuild, or replace the Hospitals in Gaza and assure all the Palestinians the kind of quality medical care and treatment that Israelis take for granted. The Israeli military must protect the hospitals as hospitals while they are cleaning out the tunnel systems which are at the heart of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. Israel can build new hospitals and the Israeli military is certainly capable of securing the immediate neighborhood surrounding the Hospitals safe from terrorist incursions.
The pharmaceutical industry and medical supply companies of the world could make sure that all the medications and medical supplies the hospitals need would be supplied and the Israelis and the oil-rich states of the Muslim world could underwrite the cost which would be only a fraction of the cost of supplying weapons to the warring parties.
Israel has one of the most technologically advanced healthcare systems in the world. If there is an insufficient staff for the hospitals from among the Palestinians, the Israelis should make up the difference with their own physicians, nurses, and skilled medical technicians.
The entire western boundary of Gaza is the Mediterranean Sea. The United States Navy hospital ships Mercy and Comfort have 1000 bed, fully equipped facilities on board. Immediate deployment of one of them to Gaza would deliver vital humanitarian support and provide a beacon of hope to the two million residents of Gaza.

RFA Hospital Ship Argus
Providing tertiary hospital care aboard a United States Navy hospital ship and ferrying severely injured civilians — women and children — by well-marked Israeli helicopters from the rubble of the battlefield to the hospital ship would certainly help dispel the image of the Israeli military bringing death and destruction from the air.
Supplying medical care and treatment for the Palestinian people would begin to promote a change in their opinions about Israel and the United States. It would begin to improve the world’s perception of the humanitarian intentions of both the United States and Israel.
It would be very hard for the mother of a child who has been seriously injured and recovered through the care of American and Israeli doctors to continue hating the people who saved her child.
Making rebuilt hospitals in Gaza islands of hope for the Palestinian people would give them a view of a possible future where peace replaces war.