Israel stepped up allegations of abuse by Hamas at the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital on Sunday, saying a captured soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages were being held at the site that has been at the center of its devastating six-week offensive.
At one point, a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa Hospital has evacuated patients and staff since Israeli troops moved in last week on what they called a mission to root out hidden Hamas facilities.
Israel is also searching for about 240 people abducted by Hamas in Gaza after a cross-border attack on October 7.
One of them was a 19-year-old Israeli conscript, Noah Marciano, whose body was found near Shifa last week. Hamas said he was killed in an Israeli airstrike and released a video that appeared to show a body with no markings except a head wound.
The Israeli military said a forensic examination found he had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such an impact.
“According to intelligence – solid intelligence – Noah was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa Hospital. He was killed there by a Hamas terrorist,” said chief spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, according to Reuters.
In his televised briefing, Hagari said Hamas gunmen had brought a Nepali and a Thai to Shifa, among the foreign workers caught in the October 7 raid. He did not name the two hostages.
CCTV video broadcast by Hagari appears to show a group of men marching into the hospital, to the surprise of medical staff. Another video shows an injured man on a gurney. Another man nearby, in civilian clothes, had an automatic rifle.
Hamas did not immediately comment on Hagari’s statements. The Palestinian Islamist group, which governs Gaza, said earlier that it had taken some of the hostages to hospitals for treatment.
Separately on Sunday, the Israeli military released a video of what it described as a 55-meter-long tunnel dug by Palestinians 10 meters below the Shifa compound.
While acknowledging that it has a network of hundreds of kilometers of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts throughout the Palestinian enclave, Hamas has denied that they are in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1726319791865016493
The video shows a narrow passageway with an arched concrete roof, ending at what the military described in a statement as a blast-proof door.
The statement did not say what might be behind the door. The tunnel was accessed through a shaft discovered in a shed inside the Shifa compound that contained ammunition, it said. The second video shows the outer opening of the shaft in the complex.
Mounir El Barsh, the director of Gaza’s health ministry, dismissed Israel’s statement about the tunnel as “pure lies”.
“They have been in the hospital for eight days… and yet they found nothing,” he told Al Jazeera television, Klix.ba reports.
