The Israeli military consolidated its control over Gaza’s largest hospital on Wednesday after storming the complex overnight. Inside, soldiers conducted searches and interrogations, and Israeli officials said they found rifles, ammunition, body armor and other military equipment in a radiology building.
In a video filmed at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, showed about 10 firearms, ammunition, body armor and Hamas military uniforms, some of which he said were hidden behind MRI machines , others in nearby storage units and some behind what he called an “explosion-proof door.” The claims made in the video could not be independently verified.
Hamas, which has repeatedly denied using the hospital for military operations, issued a statement calling the Israeli claims “a fabricated story that no one would believe.” A Hamas official, Bassem Naim, speaking to Al Jazeera, dismissed the video as fake “theatrics.”
Al-Shifa Hospital has become the focus of Israel’s 40-day effort to wrest control of Gaza from Hamas, and its capture by Israel was a significant step that could affect the pace and scale of its war with Hamas. Israel claims Hamas set up a military command center at the hospital and used its patients and staff as human shields.
The occupation of Al-Shifa, along with evidence presented by the Israelis of Hamas’s military presence there, could influence international sentiment about the invasion as well as ongoing negotiations to release hostages captured by Hamas last month. Gaza authorities said on Wednesday that the Israelis were in control of the complex.
Israeli soldiers briefly exchanged fire with gunmen outside the hospital before entering, a senior military official said, but more than 12 hours after it began, the operation resembled more a police raid than a pitched battle.
A senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss continuing the operation, said troops interrogated people at the hospital and found weapons, but declined to provide evidence or further details.
A Palestinian in an operating room at the hospital complex said that rumors of interrogations and searches, including excavations, had spread among people there, and that a dense line of Israeli armored vehicles had closed around the hospital.
Little information was available on Wednesday afternoon as communications in Gaza City were disrupted.
Palestinian officials, the heads of U.N. agencies and some Middle Eastern regional leaders condemned the raid and warned that it endangered the lives of Gaza’s most vulnerable.
For years, Israel has claimed that Hamas set up a military command center beneath the hospital and turned its patients into human shields.
For Palestinians, Al-Shifa Hospital is a civilian facility that has served as a refuge for thousands of displaced people in the Gaza Strip as well as the seriously ill and wounded for weeks. Hamas and the hospital’s leadership deny its use as a military base.
The Israeli military entered Gaza last month after Hamas-led attacks on Israel killed about 1,200 people on October 7. Since then, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Gaza health authorities – one of the highest death tolls in any airstrike this century.
The Hamas-run state media office in Gaza said in a statement that Israeli soldiers beat patients and displaced people seeking shelter at the hospital and drove others from the complex.
Muhammad Zaqout, a senior Gaza health official, said in a news conference that the Israeli soldiers first entered part of a surgical ward before later taking control of the radiology and cardiology departments.
Because of the communication breakdown, The New York Times was unable to reach hospital administrators. The Palestinian man, interviewed by telephone in the hospital’s operating room building, said he had never heard of anyone being beaten.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Ibillin, Israel.
– Patrick Kingsley reports from Jerusalem