Medics and doctors inside Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, reported seeing Israeli tanks roll into the huge medical compound in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Over the course of the day, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) troops stormed the complex after claiming to have intelligence that Hamas was using it as a military base.
For six days Al-Shifa, currently sheltering over 20,000 Gazans, has been without power, and its supplies of food and clean water are critically low. Newborn babies have been removed from their incubators because there is no electricity to power them.
After entering the hospital, Israeli commandos ordered every Palestinian male to leave the hospital.
“All men 16 years and above, raise your hands,” a soldier shouted in accented Arabic, according to a journalist speaking to AFP. “Exit the building towards the courtyard and surrender,” he ordered.
More than 1,000 men were reportedly led into the courtyard, where some of them were strip-searched for explosives.
The IDF described the raid as “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area in the Al-Shifa hospital, based on intelligence information and an operational necessity.”
The Israeli army claims to have intelligence that Hamas is using an area below the hospital as a military command centre. The US, whose government supports Israel, claims to have received intelligence that supports these claims. Hamas has strongly denied them.
In the search, the IDF claims to have found “weapons and other terror infrastructure” inside the hospital and that they had seen “concrete evidence that Hamas terrorists used the Al-Shifa hospital as a terror headquarters”.
Hamas described these claims as “nothing but a continuation of the lies and cheap propaganda”.
Although no deaths have been reported during the raid, the World Health Organisation said it lost communication with its contacts inside the hospital.
For days, the Israeli army has surrounded the medical complex. Patients have been moved away from windows for fear of being hit by sniper fire and corpses have been piled outside buildings because the fighting means it is dangerous to step too far outside.
People attempting to flee the compound have reportedly been forced to return because the surrounding streets are dangerous.
Compiled by staff writer
Pictured above: Al-Shifa hospital.
Image source: X
