A senior official in Hamas-controlled Gaza’s health ministry says Israeli forces are still operating at al-Shifa hospital, the territory’s largest, hours after entering it early Wednesday morning. Speaking by phone from the hospital, Munir al-Boursh told the AP that Israeli soldiers ransacked the basement and other buildings, including those housing the emergency and surgery wards.
“They are still here… patients, women and children are terrified,” he said. He said the doctors promised to stay with their patients “until the end”. Al-Boursh called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure a safe corridor for the departure of patients, medical staff and displaced families trapped in the facility.
Al-Boursh said an Israeli official spoke to him by phone early Wednesday and asked him to join forces searching the facility, but he declined.
Israel claims its army delivered medical supplies to the hospital and says Hamas operates a command center from the compound’s basement, which Hamas has denied.
BBC Gaza reporter Rushdi Abualouf previously reported speaking to a journalist inside Al-Shifa Hospital.
“He told me that over the loudspeaker, IDF soldiers asked all men between the ages of 16 and 40 to leave the hospital buildings, except for the surgical and emergency rooms, and come to the hospital courtyard,” Abualouf said.
In his statement, he added that during the past hour, Israeli soldiers fired in the air to force those who remained inside the hospital to come out. He also said they installed a scanning device and sensors and asked all men to go through them.
The BBC states that it has not been able to independently confirm the allegations from the hospital.
The Red Cross and the United Nations (UN) expressed great concern after the operation of the Israeli army; to the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.”I am horrified by the reports of military actions on the Shifa Hospital in Gaza,” wrote on the X social network the head of the UN’s emergency humanitarian operations, Martin Griffiths.
“The protection of newborns, patients, medical personnel and all civilians must take priority,” the UN official added, stressing that “hospitals are not battlefields.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross and the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) expressed great concern about the consequences for medical staff, patients and civilians who took refuge in the hospital. The Red Cross reminds that “patients, medical staff and civilians must be protected at all times”.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on the X Network that “the information about the military incursion into Shifa Hospital is deeply concerning.” He added that the WHO again lost contact with the medical staff at the hospital.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces said today that the military operation continues in part of the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, and that “terrorists” and explosives were eliminated before entering. The Israeli army previously announced that it entered the hospital, which it was besieging as part of a ground offensive against Hamas, early this morning. Israel claims that the hospital is the command center of Hamas.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, including two-thirds of them women and minors, have died in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, according to the Gaza ministry. About 2,700 are missing.
More than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Israel. The most casualties were in the initial attacks by Hamas, when the border fence between Gaza and Israel was breached and around 240 hostages were taken to that Palestinian territory.
Photo: Reuters
