An opening to a tunnel that the Israeli military said was used by Palestinian militants under Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip, as seen in this screenshot from a handout video released by the Israeli Defense Forces on November 19, 2023 published ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group… Purchase license rights. Read more
JERUSALEM, Nov 19 (Portal) – Israel on Sunday stepped up its accusations of Hamas abuses at the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, saying a captured soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages were held at a site that was the focus of his devastating six weeks of treatment -old offensive.
Al-Shifa Hospital once served as a refuge for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees and evacuated patients and staff since Israeli troops moved in last week on what they called a mission to root out hidden Hamas facilities.
Israel is also searching for about 240 people abducted by Hamas to Gaza after an Oct. 7 cross-border attack that sparked the war.
One of them was a 19-year-old Israeli army conscript, Noa Marciano, whose body was recovered near Shifa last week. Hamas said she died in an Israeli airstrike and released a video that appeared to show her body, which bore no signs except for a head wound.
The Israeli military said a forensic examination showed she suffered non-life-threatening injuries from such an attack.
“According to intelligence – solid intelligence – Noa was captured by Hamas terrorists within the walls of Shifa Hospital. There she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist,” said chief spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
He didn’t elaborate.
In his televised briefing, Hagari said that Hamas gunmen had brought a Nepalese and a Thai national to Shifa among the foreign workers arrested in the Oct. 7 raid. He did not name the two hostages.
CCTV video broadcast by Hagari appeared to show a group of men marching a person carrying a frog into a hospital, to the surprise of medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a stretcher. Another man in civilian clothes nearby had an assault rifle.
Hamas did not immediately comment on Hagari’s statements. The Palestinian Islamist group that rules Gaza previously said it had taken some hostages to hospitals for treatment.
Separately, the Israeli military released a video on Sunday of a so-called tunnel, 55 meters long, dug by Palestinians 10 meters below the Shifa compound.
While Hamas acknowledges that it has a network of hundreds of kilometers of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts across the Palestinian enclave, it denied that these are located in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
The video showed a narrow passageway with a vaulted concrete ceiling that ended at a door that the military described in a statement as a blast-proof door.
The statement did not say what might be behind the door. Access to the tunnel was through a shaft discovered in a shed on the Shifa site that contained ammunition, it said. A second video showed an outdoor manhole opening on the site.
Mounir El Barsh, the director of the Gaza Health Ministry, dismissed the Israeli statement about the tunnel as a “pure lie.”
“They’ve been in the hospital for eight days… and still haven’t found anything,” he told Al Jazeera television.
Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by David Holmes and Alex Richardson
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