For the people of Gaza, Al Shifa is the largest and most modern hospital anywhere – a lifeline in normal times and now a refuge from relentless Israeli airstrikes.
More than 60,000 people are housed there. But for the Israeli military it is a threat and perhaps a target.
On Friday, hours before the Israeli military stepped up its bombing of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for mass killings of Israelis by Hamas three weeks ago, it held a news conference saying that Al Shifa was hiding underground command centers for Hamas – sparking fears woke up that the military was laying the foundation for the attack on the hospital.
Hamas “exercises its command and control in various departments of the hospital,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said in English, citing intelligence sources he did not disclose. He showed an illustrated map of the hospital that allegedly marked several underground Hamas facilities in the complex.
“Here they are directing rocket attacks and commanding Hamas troops,” he said at the news conference in Tel Aviv.
He also played a recording of a call in which an unidentified man told a woman that Hamas’s military headquarters was located below the hospital, although he did not provide any information about its origin.
“God forbid!” replies the woman, who is also unnamed, in the audio recording.
Salama Marouf, head of the Gaza government’s Hamas-run media office, denied the accusation in a news conference Friday evening, saying Israel had not provided “a single piece of evidence” to support its claims about Al Shifa. He said the recording quoted by Admiral Hagari was “fake.”
Displaced families seek refuge in hospital this week.Credit: Dawood Nemer/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
On Saturday, Admiral Hagari said the press conference about the hospital was part of ongoing efforts to “expose Hamas’s exploitation of civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Also on Saturday, Israel released two videos in which it said Palestinian prisoners “involved” in Hamas’s Oct. 7 raids in Israel spoke about Hamas’s use of Al Shifa.
“For example, from what I heard, I know Shifa Hospital, they use it, they hide there,” says one who describes himself as a paramedic in the video.
Israel has long viewed civilian infrastructure such as homes, shopping malls and places of worship as legitimate targets for its attacks and says Hamas conducts operations in such places, using civilians as human shields.
Israel says it tries to distinguish between civilians and combatants when carrying out attacks. The Gaza Strip Health Ministry has released the names of at least 1,500 children under 10 years old who were allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes from October 7 to 26.
Smoke rises from the northern Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike on Saturday. On Friday evening, Israel entered the Gaza Strip after an intense bombardment with artillery and airstrikes, military officials said. Photo credit: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Al Shifa’s usual capacity is 700 beds. But it now houses more than 60,000 people – the wounded, people trying to care for them, and tens of thousands more who have sought refuge there because they believe a hospital would offer them some protection.
The displaced people’s laundry hangs out of the windows and along the metal fence surrounding the hospital. Children run through the fluorescent-lit hallways. At night, people huddle under colorful blankets as staff prepare for another day of treating patients without enough fuel, water or essential medications.
Al Shifa’s current patients include approximately 130 newborns who were orphaned immediately after birth, according to Al Shifa doctors.
As their pregnant mothers were pulled dead or dying from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, obstetricians went to work pulling the infants from their mothers’ bodies. They were born prematurely and placed in incubators at Al Shifa’s neonatal intensive care unit.
Most of them are the only survivors in their families, according to Bisan Ouda, a journalist and filmmaker from Gaza who filmed at the hospital last week and interviewed staff there in videos released by the U.N. Population Fund.
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A doctor who treats premature babies at Al Shifa Hospital said many of the newborns are now orphans.SourceCredit:Mohammed Al-Masri/Portal
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian plastic surgeon who volunteers at Al Shifa’s burns treatment unit, told CNN on October 24 that the hospital had coined a new term “wounded child with no surviving family” to focus on more than 50 to relate to children who had been pulled from the rubble at this point and taken to Al Shifa.
“As many children as I have treated, they don’t have a single relative left,” he said in a separate interview with a Lebanese television journalist on Friday. “The father was killed, the mother too and the brothers, aunts, uncles, grandfather and grandmother.”
He added: “It’s hard not to imagine your own children when you see these people’s children, as they suffer in such brutal ways. “Their only sin is being Palestinian.”
Iyad Abuheweila and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.