To individuals in Gaza, Al Shifa is the most important and most superior hospital round — a lifeline, in regular occasions, and now a spot of refuge from relentless Israeli airstrikes.
More than 60,000 individuals are sheltering there. But to the Israeli navy, it’s a risk, 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 news convention by which it stated 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 control in different departments of the hospital,” stated 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 stated had been a number of underground Hamas installations within 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 name, whose origins he didn’t specify, by which 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 top of the Hamas-run Gaza authorities media workplace, denied the accusation in a news convention on Friday evening, saying Israel had “failed to provide a single piece of evidence” supporting its claims about Al Shifa. He stated the recording Adm. Hagari cited was “fabricated.”
On Saturday, Adm. Hagari stated the news convention concerning the hospital was a part of a seamless effort to “expose” Hamas’s “exploitation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.”
Also on Saturday, Israel launched a pair of movies that it stated confirmed Palestinian prisoners who had 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 within the video as a paramedic.
Israel has lengthy seen civilian infrastructure resembling houses, malls and locations of worship as professional 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 tell apart between civilians and combatants. Gaza’s well being ministry has launched the names of at the least 1,500 youngsters underneath the age of 10 who it says had 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 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 steel fence across the hospital. Children run down the fluorescent-lit corridors. At evening, individuals huddle collectively underneath colourful blankets, whereas the workers put together for one more day of treating sufferers with out sufficient gas, water or important drugs.
Among Al Shifa’s present sufferers are about 130 newborns who had been orphaned simply as they had been born, in response to medical doctors at Al Shifa.
When their pregnant moms had been pulled useless 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 response to Bisan Ouda, a Gazan journalist and filmmaker who filmed contained in the hospital this previous week and interviewed workers there in movies launched by the U.N. Population Fund.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian plastic surgeon volunteering at Al Shifa’s burn therapy unit, informed Act Daily News on Oct. 24 that the hospital had coined a brand new designation, “wounded child with no surviving family,” to confer with greater than 50 youngsters who had by 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.
Source: www.nytimes.com