On Sunday, Israel escalated its accusations against the Hamas movement of committing violations at Al-Shifa Hospital, saying that it had witnessed the execution of a captured female soldier and the detention of two foreigners hostage.
Al-Shifa is the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and one of the focuses of the devastating attack launched by Israel six weeks ago, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians took refuge at one time.
The hospital is currently evacuating patients and staff since Israeli forces stormed it last week on the grounds that it contains a Hamas center.
Israel is also searching for about 240 people kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza after a cross-border attack on October 7 that sparked the war.
One of them was 19-year-old Noah Marciano, an Israeli army conscript, whose body was recovered near Al-Shifa Hospital last week. Hamas said she was killed in an Israeli air strike and broadcast a video clip showing her body without signs except for a head wound.
The Israeli army said that a forensic examination showed that she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries as a result of such a strike.
Army spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said, “According to confirmed intelligence information, Hamas terrorists took Noah inside the walls of Al-Shifa Hospital, where they killed her.”
He did not go into details.
Hagari said in his press conference broadcast on television that Hamas militants also brought a Nepalese and a Thai national among the foreign workers who were detained in the October 7 attack to Al-Shifa Hospital. The names of the two hostages were not mentioned.
In the video clip taken by surveillance cameras and broadcast by Hagari, a group of men appear to be taking a person to the hospital, which surprised the medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a stretcher. There was another man wearing civilian clothes and carrying a rifle nearby.
Hamas has not yet commented on Hagari’s statements. The Palestinian Islamic Movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, said earlier that it had transferred some of the hostages to hospitals for treatment.
In a separate context, the Israeli army published a video clip on Sunday of what it described as a tunnel 55 meters long and ten meters deep, dug by Palestinian militants under the Shifa complex.
While Hamas admits that it has a network hundreds of kilometers long of secret tunnels, bunkers and openings throughout the Palestinian Strip, it denies that these tunnels are located in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
The video clip shows a narrow corridor with an arched concrete ceiling that ends with a gray door that the army said in a statement is resistant to explosions.
The statement did not address what is behind the door. The statement said that the tunnel was accessed through an opening discovered in a small building containing munitions inside the Al-Shifa Complex. Another video clip showed an external opening in the complex.
Munir Al-Bursh, director of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, denied the Israeli statement about the tunnel and described it as a “complete lie.”
He told Al Jazeera satellite channel, “They have been in the hospital for eight days… and they did not find anything.”
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2023-11-20 12:49:48
