To folks in Gaza, Al Shifa is the largest and maximum complex clinic round — a lifeline, in customary instances, and now a spot of shelter from relentless Israeli airstrikes.
More than 60,000 persons are sheltering there. But to the Israeli army, this can be a danger, and, possibly, a goal.
On Friday, hours ahead of the Israeli army stepped up its bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s mass killings of Israelis 3 weeks in the past, it held a news convention in which it stated that Al Shifa conceals underground command facilities for Hamas — elevating fears that the army was once laying the groundwork for attacking the clinic.
Hamas “does its command and control in different departments of the hospital,” stated Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the manager spokesman for the Israeli army, talking in English and bringing up intelligence resources that he didn’t liberate. He displayed an illustrated map of the clinic marking what he stated have been a number of underground Hamas installations in the complicated.
“This is where they direct rocket attacks, command Hamas forces,” he stated on the news convention held in Tel Aviv.
He additionally performed a recording of a choice, whose origins he didn’t specify, in which an unidentified guy tells a girl that Hamas’s army headquarters are beneath the clinic.
“God forbid!” the girl, who may be unnamed, replies in the audio recording.
Salama Marouf, the pinnacle of the Hamas-run Gaza govt media workplace, denied the accusation in a news conference on Friday night time, pronouncing Israel had “failed to provide a single piece of evidence” supporting its claims about Al Shifa. He stated the recording Adm. Hagari cited was once “fabricated.”
On Saturday, Adm. Hagari stated the news convention in regards to the clinic was once a part of a unbroken effort to “expose” Hamas’s “exploitation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.”
Also on Saturday, Israel launched a couple of videos that it stated confirmed Palestinian prisoners who have been “involved” in Hamas’s Oct. 7 raids on Israel talking about Hamas’s use of Al Shifa.
“I know, for example, according to what I’ve heard, the Shifa Hospital, they’re using it, they’re hiding there,” says one, who describes himself in the video as a paramedic.
Israel has lengthy seen civilian infrastructure similar to houses, department stores and puts of worship as authentic objectives for its moves, pronouncing Hamas runs operations in the ones sorts of puts, the use of civilians as human shields.
Israel says that once attacking, it makes an attempt to differentiate between civilians and fighters. Gaza’s well being ministry has launched the names of no less than 1,500 kids underneath the age of 10 who it says have been killed in Israeli airstrikes from Oct. 7 to Oct. 26.
Al Shifa’s standard capability is 700 beds. But it’s now housing greater than 60,000 folks — the wounded, the ones looking to deal with them and tens of 1000’s extra who’ve taken shelter there, believing {that a} clinic would supply them some coverage.
The laundry of the displaced hangs out the home windows and all alongside the steel fence across the clinic. Children run down the fluorescent-lit corridors. At night time, folks huddle in combination underneath colourful blankets, whilst the body of workers get ready for every other day of treating sufferers with out sufficient gasoline, water or crucial drugs.
Among Al Shifa’s present sufferers are about 130 newborns who have been orphaned simply as they have been born, consistent with medical doctors at Al Shifa.
When their pregnant moms have been pulled useless or loss of life from the rubble of structures destroyed in Israeli airstrikes, obstetricians went to paintings, tugging the babies from their moms’ our bodies. Born untimely, they have been positioned in incubators in Al Shifa’s neonatal in depth care unit.
Most of them are the one survivors in their households, consistent with Bisan Ouda, a Gazan journalist and filmmaker who filmed within the clinic this previous week and interviewed body of workers there in movies launched via the U.N. Population Fund.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian plastic surgeon volunteering at Al Shifa’s burn remedy unit, told CNN on Oct. 24 that the clinic had coined a brand new designation, “wounded child with no surviving family,” to confer with greater than 50 kids who had via that time been pulled from the rubble and brought to Al Shifa.
“The amount of children I treated — they have not a single relative left,” he stated in a separate interview with a Lebanese tv journalist on Friday. “The father was killed, the mother also, and the brothers, aunts, uncles, grandfather and grandmother.”
He added: “It’s hard not to imagine your own children when you see these people’s children, as they suffer like this in this brutal way. Their only sin is being Palestinian.”
Iyad Abuheweila and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.