By Mike Brest. Media: Washingtonexaminer
The Israel Defense Forces have completed their operations in and around Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza.
The IDF previously cleared the hospital last year, but restarted those efforts about two weeks ago and have engaged in close combat against Hamas at the hospital. Israeli military officials said they killed about 200 terrorists in this “targeted operation” that began last month, while more than 500 others have been detained.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said their operations around the hospital were prompted by intelligence that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists reentered the hospital in mid-March.
“It was the base where the control of Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the north was conducted by both political rank commanders and operatives,” he said.
Palestinian officials described the scene around the hospital in stark terms following the Israeli forces’ withdrawal.
“The scene here is one of the ugliest we have seen since Oct. 7 until this moment,” Mahmoud Bassal, Gaza’s Civil Defense spokesman, who was at the complex Monday, said. “The hospital has become completely unfit to be a medical center. All buildings were completely burned, and many of them were bombed by artillery shells.”
Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Sunday 21 patients had died since the siege began on March 18.
Israel previously raided Shifa Hospital back in November and moved on to carrying out operations in other parts of Gaza.
The U.S. intelligence community affirmed in January Israel’s statement that Hamas and PIJ had been using the hospital and facilities underground beneath the hospital in violation of international law.
A U.S. official told the Washington Examiner in January that the intelligence community is “confident” in its assessment that Hamas and PIJ used the hospital complex and “sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages,” while they “destroyed documents and electronics at the complex in advance of the IDF’s operation.”
A central tenet of Hamas’s military strategy is to embed itself within and underneath Gaza’s civilian population, hence their previous use of the hospital and their attempt to get back into it in recent weeks. The result is that Hamas puts Palestinian civilians in harm’s way, forcing Israeli forces to decide whether to risk the possibility of incurring civilian casualties in order to go after the terrorist group.
The U.S. has repeatedly urged Israeli forces to do more to protect civilians over the course of several months. The death toll, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, exceeds 32,000 people, but that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Biden administration is trying to convince Israel not to carry out a ground invasion into Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where more than 1 million Palestinians have fled to in an attempt to avoid the front lines. Israeli officials maintain they have to in order to achieve their war goals.
U.S. and Israeli leaders are meeting virtually on Monday to discuss alternative options to a Rafah operation that the U.S. sees as viable.
Discussion about this post