Gaza’s hospitals have emerged as a focus in Israel’s warfare with Hamas, with all sides citing how the opposite has pulled the services into the battle as proof of the enemy’s disregard for the security of civilians.
In 4 months of warfare, Israeli troops have entered a number of hospitals, together with the Qatari Hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Rantisi Specialized Hospital for Children, to seek for weapons and fighters. But Al-Shifa Hospital has taken on specific significance as a result of it’s Gaza’s largest medical facility, and due to Israel’s high-profile claims that Hamas leaders operated a command-and-control heart beneath it. Hamas and the hospital’s workers, in the meantime, insisted it was solely a medical heart.
Al-Shifa’s worth as a navy goal was not instantly clear within the days after the Nov. 15 raid, even after the Israeli navy launched the tunnel video that was used to create the 3-D mannequin seen right here.
But proof examined by The New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospital for canopy, saved weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complicated that was equipped with water, energy and air-conditioning.
Classified Israeli intelligence paperwork, obtained and reviewed by The Times, point out that the tunnel is a minimum of 700 toes lengthy, twice so long as the navy revealed publicly, and that it extends past the hospital and sure connects to Hamas’s bigger underground community.
According to categorized pictures reviewed by The Times, Israeli troopers discovered underground bunkers, dwelling quarters and a room that appeared to be wired for computer systems and communications gear alongside part of the tunnel past the hospital — chambers that weren’t seen within the video launched by the Israeli navy.
What the video confirmed beneath Al-Shifa
The dot on the diagram follows the trail of the video beneath that was launched by Israel after the raid.
By Malika Khurana and Helmuth Rosales; video from the Israel Defense Forces
The Israeli navy, nevertheless, has struggled to show that Hamas maintained a command-and-control heart beneath the power. Critics of the Israeli navy say the proof doesn’t assist its early claims, noting that it had distributed materials earlier than the raid exhibiting 5 underground complexes and in addition had stated the tunnel community could possibly be reached from wards inside a hospital constructing. Israel has publicly revealed the existence of just one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital, on the shack exterior its major buildings.
The Israeli navy says that it moved rigorously as a result of the tunnel was booby-trapped and ran out of time to examine earlier than it destroyed the tunnel and withdrew from the hospital. Israeli and Qatari officers, talking on situation of anonymity, stated Israel had to go away the hospital to adjust to the phrases of a brief ceasefire in late November.
American officers have stated their very own intelligence backs up the Israeli case, together with proof that Hamas used Al-Shifa to maintain a minimum of a couple of hostages. American intelligence additionally signifies that Hamas fighters evacuated the complicated days earlier than Israeli forces moved into Al-Shifa, destroying paperwork and electronics as they left.
Hospitals are protected beneath worldwide legislation, even when they supply medical look after combatants, however their use for different acts which are “harmful to the enemy” could make them respectable targets for navy motion. But any motion should weigh the anticipated navy benefit in opposition to the anticipated hurt to civilians.
Al-Shifa, Israeli officers have argued, is an instance of Hamas’s willingness to use hospitals as cowl and switch civilians into human shields. But critics say it’s also an instance of the toll on civilians when Israeli forces encompass and raid hospitals to pursue Hamas fighters or rescue hostages, operations that may lower off medical doctors from gasoline and provides and residents from urgently wanted medical care.
Five untimely infants died at Al-Shifa earlier than the raid “due to lack of electricity and fuel,” in accordance to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which helped set up the evacuation of 31 different infants.
“We all know that the health care system is or has collapsed,” Lynn Hastings, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, has advised reporters.
The portion of the tunnel seen within the Israeli navy video is a minimum of 350 toes lengthy. But confidential navy paperwork reveal that the tunnel extends twice as far.
Satellite Image by Planet Labs
Israel launched its warfare in Gaza after the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7, by which a minimum of 1,200 individuals had been killed and greater than 200 had been taken hostage. Since the beginning of the warfare, greater than 28,000 individuals have been killed in Gaza, in accordance to well being officers there.
In the face of worldwide opprobrium over its raids on hospitals, Israel has publicized proof that it says reveals that Hamas hid fighters among the many sick and injured, and held hostages within the services. The Israeli navy stated that earlier than coming into Al-Shifa, it warned the buildings’ occupants, opened evacuation routes and despatched Arabic-speaking medical groups together with the troopers.
Hamas and Gazan well being officers say the hospitals have served solely as medical services. But past accusing the Israeli navy of planting proof at hospitals, Hamas and Gazan officers haven’t instantly refuted the proof offered by Israel.
The Israeli navy stated it apprehended dozens of “terror operatives” at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December, and launched movies, on the time, of males carrying weapons. A spokesman for the well being ministry in Gaza stated that Israeli forces had requested the hospital’s directors to hand over the weapons of its safety guards.
After the raid on the Qatari Hospital, the generally used identify for the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, the Israeli navy confirmed a video on Nov. 5 of what it stated was the doorway to “a tunnel that was being used for terror infrastructures” on the hospital’s grounds.
But the video seems to present one thing else: a water storage space in-built 2016, when the hospital was constructed, in accordance to engineering plans and pictures from the hospital’s building reviewed by The Times.
The Israeli navy declined to present extra imagery to assist its assertion that this was a tunnel entryway or a part of a tunnel complicated.
Just earlier than the Al-Shifa raid, Israeli forces entered Al-Rantisi hospital, on Nov. 13, quickly after its remaining sufferers and workers had left. Within days, the navy launched two movies that confirmed weapons and explosives it stated it discovered there, and a room the place it stated hostages had been saved. The well being ministry in Gaza disputed the assertions made within the movies and stated the weapons had been planted.
One of the videos released by Israel confirmed troops speeding into the hospital and showing to discover explosives, weapons and the hostage room. In the opposite, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the Israeli navy, confirmed off weapons, explosives and different weapons that he stated had been discovered within the basement of the hospital.
The video included footage of a bit of paper taped to a wall within the hospital’s basement. Admiral Hagari stated the paper — a grid with Arabic phrases and numbers inside every sq. — could possibly be a schedule for guarding hostages “where every terrorist writes his name.”
The Gazan well being ministry stated it was nothing greater than a piece schedule. But the calendar begins on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas terrorist assault on Israel, and an Arabic title written on the high makes use of the militants’ identify for the assault: “Al Aqsa Flood Battle, 7/10/2023.”
Given its measurement and historical past, taking management of Al-Shifa was all the time a extra essential purpose for the Israeli navy than the opposite smaller services.
Concrete sections of the Al-Shifa tunnel are seen on this nonetheless picture from the video launched by the Israeli navy.
Israel Defense Forces
There is substantial impartial proof that Hamas constructed an unlimited tunnel community throughout Gaza. Senior Israeli protection officers, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to focus on intelligence issues, estimate the community is between 350 and 450 miles — extraordinary figures for a territory that at its longest level is just 25 miles. The officers estimate there are millions of entrances to the community.
There can be established documentation that Hamas used Al-Shifa earlier than the warfare to masks a few of its actions. During Israel’s three-week warfare with Hamas in 2008, armed Hamas fighters in civilian clothes had been seen roaming Al-Shifa’s corridors and killing an Israeli collaborator, in accordance to a Times correspondent reporting in Gaza on the time. Six years later, throughout the subsequent spherical of preventing, the militants routinely held information conferences on the hospital and used it as a protected assembly place for Hamas officers to converse with journalists.
After that warfare, Amnesty International reported that Hamas had used deserted areas of Al-Shifa, “including the outpatients’ clinic area, to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical center.”
Israel’s critics, although, countered with statements made on the time by two Norwegian medical doctors, who described themselves as pro-Palestinian activists and had labored in Gaza throughout the 2014 warfare. They insisted that they noticed no Hamas presence at Al-Shifa.
Israel has additionally launched video footage, taken by the hospital’s personal safety cameras, which it says reveals two hostages being introduced to Al-Shifa shortly after being kidnapped within the Oct. 7 assault.
The Al-Shifa tunnel was found by following ducts that ran underground from air-conditioning items that had been powered by the hospital’s electrical energy provide and mounted on one in all its buildings, officers stated. Israeli troopers additionally discovered proof that the hospital’s water provide was being fed to the tunnel.
The Israeli navy has additionally displayed weapons and different gear it stated had been discovered inside Al-Shifa, together with grenades positioned close to an MRI machine. Among the cache offered to journalists had been belongings that Israeli officers stated had been taken from hostages, together with a bag emblazoned with the identify Be’eri, a kibbutz attacked by Hamas.
The navy additionally stated it discovered weapons in Al-Shifa’s parking zone, and a Toyota car an identical to these used within the Oct. 7 assault and loaded with the identical gear that militants carried throughout the raid, together with weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Israeli officers speculated that it was a spare car not used within the assault.
Images from the video launched by the I.D.F. Clockwise from high left: A room, a sink, electrical wires and a rest room.
Israel Defense Forces
Some of what the Israeli navy has proven up to now doesn’t wholly match the outline of a terrorist headquarters that it supplied forward of its floor invasion of Gaza on Oct. 27.
Underneath Al-Shifa, the Israeli navy wrote in a lengthy post on its web site, “lies a labyrinth of tunnels and underground compounds used by Hamas’s leaders to direct terrorist activities and rocket fire and to manufacture and store a variety of weapons and ammunition.”
There could not be a means to instantly assess that declare. Israeli forces remained at Al-Shifa for a bit greater than per week.
Hours earlier than Israeli forces left the hospital on Nov. 24, troopers lined the tunnel with explosives and destroyed it in a blast that despatched plumes of smoke excessive into the air and rocked buildings on the bottom above.
Methodology
The 3-D mannequin of the tunnel beneath Al-Shifa Hospital is schematic and relies on the video launched by the Israel Defense Forces, in addition to different images and movies of the tunnel. The Times counted greater than 500 concrete modules used to assemble the tunnel, and used the thickness of every module to confirm the tunnel size inside an affordable vary. The Times verified that the approximate location of the tunnel was beneath the surgical procedure heart, and that it prolonged to a shack that was constructed extra lately.
