According to the IDF, several indications indicate that this health facility was used as a Hamas retreat but also as a place to hold hostages after the October 7 attacks. Hamas responded by accusing Israel of “spreading lies in preparation for the destruction of hospitals and the deaths of patients.”
Almost a month and a half after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli territory, the issue of the more than 200 hostages held in the Gaza Strip remains a central issue. As the Israeli army advances into the Palestinian enclave, it appears to be collecting various clues indicating that they are or will be held in hospitals that also serve as bases in Hamas’s hinterland.
In a more than two-minute video released on Tuesday evening, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari shows the basements of the so-called al-Rantissi Children’s Hospital in Gaza, where hostages were allegedly held and where weapons caches were located in tunnels.
“I want you to understand that these are war materials, explosives, explosive vests, in hospitals, on patients and then grenades, Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers. We fire rockets from hospitals,” he describes in this sequence.
Evidence of the passage of hostages?
Also in this video, the same Daniel Hagari assures that several clues, such as a baby bottle or a piece of rope near a chair, indicate that the hospital was probably used to detain Israeli hostages after the October 7 attacks.
This “evidence” includes a motorcycle “with bullet holes” that “was used by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre.” “This is currently under investigation, but we also have information that confirms this,” he said.
In a photo published in the report by IDF Lieutenant Colonel Avichay Adraee, a document posted on a wall in the “basement of Al-Rantissi Hospital” appears to indicate the terrorists before, during and after the October 7 attacks assign tasks.
“This is a list of guards in which each terrorist writes his name and each terrorist has his own team to guard the people who were here,” the army spokesman wrote in Arabic.
Hamas, for its part, responded to this publication on Tuesday morning, accusing Israel of “spreading lies in order to prepare the destruction of hospitals and the deaths of patients.”
“Closed area”
The al-Rantissi hospital district has been the scene of fierce fighting in recent days between the Israeli army, which has been strengthening its grip on northern Gaza, and Hamas. As the Times of Israel reports, the Israeli army last week killed a Hamas commander who was allegedly holding a thousand Gazan hostages at the health facility.
On Monday morning, the Hamas government’s deputy health minister, Youssef Abou Rich, said that the hospital’s patients and caregivers were “all evacuated” on Sunday “under the threat of shelling by the Israeli army.”
In the video that the spokesman showed to the press, the suspicious basement is deserted and appears to have been hastily abandoned. He described it as a “closed area compared to the rest of the hospital.”
“We can see the ventilation that was improvised and we can see the infrastructure that was built here – toilet, shower, a small kitchen – to meet the needs of the terrorists,” he said.
Israel estimates that 239 people were kidnapped in the October 7 attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. In Gaza, where the humanitarian situation is deplorable, most hospitals are now out of service. In most of them, where power is cut off and patients are turned away, doctors are forced to provide only rudimentary care to their patients.