To individuals in Gaza, Al Shifa is the largest and most superior hospital round — a lifeline, in regular instances, and now a spot of refuge from relentless Israeli airstrikes.
Greater than 60,000 individuals are sheltering there. However to the Israeli navy, it’s a menace, and, maybe, a goal.
On Friday, hours earlier than the Israeli navy stepped up its bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s mass killings of Israelis three weeks in the past, it held a information convention wherein it mentioned that Al Shifa conceals underground command facilities for Hamas — elevating fears that the navy was laying the groundwork for attacking the hospital.
Hamas “does its command and management in several departments of the hospital,” mentioned Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli navy, talking in English and citing intelligence sources that he didn’t launch. He displayed an illustrated map of the hospital marking what he mentioned had been a number of underground Hamas installations within the complicated.
“That is the place they direct rocket assaults, command Hamas forces,” he mentioned on the information convention held in Tel Aviv.
He additionally performed a recording of a name, whose origins he didn’t specify, wherein an unidentified man tells a lady that Hamas’s navy headquarters are under the hospital.
“God forbid!” the lady, who can be unnamed, replies within the audio recording.
Salama Marouf, the pinnacle of the Hamas-run Gaza authorities media workplace, denied the accusation in a information convention on Friday night time, saying Israel had “failed to offer a single piece of proof” supporting its claims about Al Shifa. He mentioned the recording Adm. Hagari cited was “fabricated.”
On Saturday, Adm. Hagari mentioned the information convention in regards to the hospital was a part of a seamless effort to “expose” Hamas’s “exploitation of the civilian inhabitants within the Gaza Strip.”
Additionally on Saturday, Israel launched a pair of movies that it mentioned confirmed Palestinian prisoners who had been “concerned” in Hamas’s Oct. 7 raids on Israel talking about Hamas’s use of Al Shifa.
“I do know, for instance, in line with what I’ve heard, the Shifa Hospital, they’re utilizing it, they’re hiding there,” says one, who describes himself within the video as a paramedic.
Israel has lengthy considered civilian infrastructure similar to properties, malls and locations of worship as reliable targets for its strikes, saying Hamas runs operations in these sorts of locations, utilizing civilians as human shields.
Israel says that when attacking, it makes an attempt to differentiate between civilians and combatants. Gaza’s well being ministry has launched the names of at the very least 1,500 kids beneath the age of 10 who it says had been killed in Israeli airstrikes from Oct. 7 to Oct. 26.
Al Shifa’s common capability is 700 beds. However it’s now housing greater than 60,000 individuals — the wounded, these making an attempt to take care of them and tens of hundreds extra who’ve taken refuge there, believing {that a} hospital would provide them some safety.
The laundry of the displaced hangs out the home windows and all alongside the metallic fence across the hospital. Youngsters run down the fluorescent-lit corridors. At night time, individuals huddle collectively beneath colourful blankets, whereas the employees put together for an additional day of treating sufferers with out sufficient gas, water or important medicines.
Amongst Al Shifa’s present sufferers are about 130 newborns who had been orphaned simply as they had been born, in line with medical doctors at Al Shifa.
When their pregnant moms had been pulled lifeless or dying from the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli airstrikes, obstetricians went to work, tugging the infants from their moms’ our bodies. Born untimely, they had been positioned in incubators in Al Shifa’s neonatal intensive care unit.
Most of them are the one survivors of their households, in line with Bisan Ouda, a Gazan journalist and filmmaker who filmed contained in the hospital this previous week and interviewed employees there in movies launched by the U.N. Inhabitants Fund.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian plastic surgeon volunteering at Al Shifa’s burn therapy unit, instructed CNN on Oct. 24 that the hospital had coined a brand new designation, “wounded little one with no surviving household,” to confer with greater than 50 kids who had by that time been pulled from the rubble and brought to Al Shifa.
“The quantity of youngsters I handled — they haven’t a single relative left,” he mentioned in a separate interview with a Lebanese tv journalist on Friday. “The daddy was killed, the mom additionally, and the brothers, aunts, uncles, grandfather and grandmother.”
He added: “It’s onerous to not think about your personal kids if you see these individuals’s kids, as they undergo like this on this brutal approach. Their solely sin is being Palestinian.”
Iyad Abuheweila and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
