Israeli occupation forces enter Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza

Open Editor’s Digest for free

Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israeli forces entered Shifa Hospital in Gaza to conduct what the army described as a “precise and targeted operation” against Hamas, hours after the United States backed its claims that the militant group is storing weapons in medical facilities.

The raid launched by Israeli forces came in the early hours of Wednesday after they surrounded the largest hospital in the besieged Strip, which houses patients and thousands of people who took refuge in the Israeli bombing of the coastal strip.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants raged for several days in the streets surrounding the hospital, prompting UN agencies to call for an end to attacks on medical facilities.

Israel claims the Shifa station, which was shut down due to fuel shortages over the weekend, is an important site for Hamas operations because it is located above the Islamist group’s underground infrastructure, which the Israeli military intends to destroy.

The Israeli army said in a statement on the social media platform X that its operation in a “specific area” of the hospital was “based on intelligence information and operational necessity.”

Doctors at the hospital in Gaza City have repeatedly denied that it was used in military operations carried out by Hamas. A spokesman for the government in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, described the Israeli advance inside the hospital as a “war crime, a moral crime and a crime against humanity.”

The spokesman said there were about 9,000 people in hospital.

Hours before Israel announced the raid on Shifa Hospital, John Kirby, spokesman for the US National Security Council, told reporters that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant faction based in Gaza, had “stockpiled weapons” at the hospital and were “preparing” for the attack. To respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.”

Kirby added that Hamas uses hospitals, including Al-Shifa Hospital, and the tunnels underneath it to hold hostages.

But he said Washington does not support striking a hospital from the air and does not want “a gun battle in a hospital where the innocent, the helpless and the sick are simply trying to get the medical care they deserve.”

The desperate situation in Gaza’s hospitals has been a source of tension between Israel and its Western allies, with the United States, France and other Western countries increasingly pressing Israel to exercise restraint in operations near medical facilities.

US President Joe Biden warned this week that hospitals “must be protected,” saying: “I hope and expect that there will be less intrusive measures regarding hospitals.”

The Israeli military said it had “publicly warned repeatedly that Hamas’ continued military use of Al-Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law.”

Muhammad Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, told Al Jazeera TV that he spoke with workers at Al-Shifa Hospital who said: “Not a single bullet was fired from inside the hospital complex.”

“There was no resistance, and this is normal because this is a civilian hospital,” Zaqout told Al Jazeera, adding that Israeli forces entered the emergency department and the basement that contains radiology equipment.

All other hospitals in northern Gaza have stopped working, except for one, according to the United Nations, as the Israeli army imposed a siege on the Strip as part of its more than five-week war against Hamas.

The Gaza Strip, inhabited by 2.3 million people, has been suffering from a worsening humanitarian crisis since Israel launched a retaliatory attack on Hamas after the armed Islamic group launched a devastating attack on October 7.

The Hamas attack on southern Israel led to the deaths of about 1,200 people and the taking of about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

More than 11,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli bombing of the Strip, according to Palestinian health officials.

Last month, Israeli forces launched a ground attack on the coastal Strip and besieged Gaza City, Hamas’s main political and military base in the Strip.

More than 1.5 million people in Gaza have been forced to leave their homes, thousands of people have taken refuge in hospitals, while the health system has been pushed to a state of collapse.

The United Nations humanitarian arm said that 32 patients – including three premature babies – had died in Al-Shifa Hospital since Saturday as a result of a power outage and “difficult conditions” in the hospital.

Its director, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, warned on Saturday that paramedics would resort to wrapping children in cellophane to keep them alive after incubators stopped working due to a power outage.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Tuesday that 170 people were buried in a mass grave in Al-Shifa Square as a result of “the difficulty of burying them” in another place “due to the siege imposed on it from all sides.” .

The ministry said on Monday that more than 100 bodies in Shifa had begun to decompose and that the “smell of corpses” was everywhere.