Press officers pass through long shafts with side rooms that apparently connect the basement of al-Shifa hospital with the wider area and also lead to private apartments.
Some seven weeks after the outbreak of war in Gaza, the Israeli military presented new images on Wednesday and Thursday that show tunnels built by Hamas beneath and in the wider area around al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Several videos have been published in which military spokespeople and, in some cases, journalists lead people through the tunnels and soldiers explain the excavation work that revealed the tunnel entrances.
A few days ago a video appeared showing a tunnel that apparently began in the basement of the large hospital and ended at a steel door with an embrasure. Now more ramifications have been presented – the accuracy of the information cannot be objectively verified from the outside.
The focus of the Israeli representation is now a tunnel more than head height, perhaps a meter wide, with an arched roof, which, according to one of the military spokesmen, is at least 300 meters long, corresponding to to the typical Hamas building and leads from the hospital to, among other things, a still unknown location. It’s explained that at one point you can’t go any further because someone has obviously recently filled in the tunnel there. “There could be a mosque behind it, an apartment building or something like that,” says the press officer.