9:15 p.m.: Israeli army takes media to tour tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital
On Wednesday, the Israeli army took journalists to the remains of the vast Al-Shifa hospital compound in Gaza, which was destroyed by bombing and where a network of Hamas tunnels was exposed.
The establishment has been the focus of several weeks of fighting, with the army convinced that the Palestinian Islamist movement had weapons depots and a command center there, something Hamas has always denied.
AFP was one of around twenty journalists invited to visit the site at dawn. The published photos, videos and interviews were all subject to military censorship.
Visible power lines, destroyed urban landscape, muddy streets, broken windows. A few meters underground, a narrow tunnel.
“It is very long,” assures Colonel Elad Tsury, commander of the 7th Brigade. “This tunnel leads from the city to the hospital,” he assures, leading the journalists to a kitchenette with a sink, a toilet and a room with two metal beds and air conditioning.
When they want to protect themselves, “Hamas fighters go into hiding, use hospitals as human shields and can stay there for a long time,” he added. But journalists were unable to visit the rest of the establishment. Otherwise, they were able to observe a stockpile of weapons, ammunition and explosives displayed by the army and said to belong to Hamas.
The visit came as Israel and Hamas announced an agreement to release 50 hostages held in the Gaza Strip in exchange for 150 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons during a four-day ceasefire in the Palestinian territory.
The army on Sunday released images purportedly from surveillance cameras at al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, showing hostages being brought to the facility on Oct. 7, the day of the attack on Hamas in southern Israel .