Israel finds hostages, tunnels and weapons at Gaza hospital

Once a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa hospital has been evacuated of patients and staff since the Israeli army swept in last week, on what it said was a mission to root out Hamas hideouts.

Israel finds hostages and gunmen at Gaza's largest hospital, photo 1 — The entrance to a tunnel that the Israeli military says was used by Palestinian militants under Al Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip. Photo: Israeli Army

Another major Israeli task is to find some 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza after the October 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel that sparked the fighting.

One of them was Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier whose body was found near Shifa last week. Hamas said she died in an Israeli airstrike and released a video showing her body with no signs of injury except for a head wound.

"According to intelligence - solid intelligence - Noa was held by Hamas terrorists inside Shifa Hospital. There she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist," Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said.

Hamas gunmen also took a Nepalese and a Thai, two of the foreign workers taken hostage from Israel, to Al Shifa hospital, Hagari said in a televised news conference.

Security camera footage released by Hagari appears to show a group of men carrying a person into the hospital, as medical staff look on in amazement. A second clip shows an injured man lying on a stretcher.

Hamas has not yet responded to Mr Hagari's statement. The Palestinian Islamist group, which runs Gaza, previously said it had taken some hostages to hospital for treatment.

Separately on Sunday, the Israeli military released video of what it described as a 55-meter-long tunnel dug by Palestinian militants 10 meters deep under the Al Shifa hospital complex.

While admitting that it has a network of hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, shelters and secret tunnels across Gaza, Hamas denies that these tunnels are located within civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.

The video shows a narrow, vaulted concrete-roofed passageway that ends in what the military described in a statement as a blast door. It also shows a tunnel leading to a warehouse inside Al Shifa Hospital that contained a large amount of weapons and ammunition.

Mounir El Barsh, director of the Gaza Health Ministry, denied Israel’s claims of a tunnel. “They have been in this hospital for eight days and they have not found anything,” he told Al Jazeera.

Hoang Anh (according to Reuters, CNN, Al Jazeera)

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