Hamas Using Children’s Hospital To Hide Hostages, Weapons (Worthy News-Investigation)
By Worthy News’ George Whitten and Stefan J. Bos
JERUSALEM/GAZA (Worthy News) – Footage obtained and carefully reviewed by Worthy News appears to confirm that Hamas is using hospitals in Gaza to hide its fighters, hostages, and weapons and to launch attacks against Israel, despite denials from the Hamas-run Health Ministry and medical staff.
A video released by Israel’s chief military spokesman from the frontlines, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, showed footage of what he said was a Hamas weapons cache found in the basement of Gaza’s Rantisi Hospital for Children.
Hagari could be seen entering the hospital with Israeli troops on Monday, a day after the facility’s last patients were reportedly evacuated. The hospital said it ran out of fuel last week, and Israel had ordered people to leave as it conducted its ground offensive.
Hagari showed a room decorated with a colorful children’s drawing of a tree, with weapons lying across the floor. He said they included explosive vests, automatic rifles, bombs, and rocket-propelled grenades.
“Hamas uses hospitals as an instrument of war,” he said. He showed another area that appeared to have been used to hold hostages.
It included a hastily installed toilet and air vent, a baby bottle, and a motorcycle — scarred by a bullet hole that he said was used in the October 7 attack against Israel when Hamas killed 1,200 men, women, and children.
One windowless room had curtains on the wall that he said could be used as a backdrop in a video. “Why would you have a curtain in front of a wall?” Hagari said forensic experts were examining the scenes.
NOT LAST HOSPITAL
“This is not the last hospital like this in Gaza, and the world should know that,” Hagari warned.
He said Israel’s Navy’s elite Shayetet 13 commando unit and the 401st Armored Brigade raided Gaza City’s Rantisi Hospital, where the Hamas operatives were holed up. Hagari didn’t say if the Hamas fighters had been killed or captured in the raid, but the pictures suggested they had left in a hurry.
In a video obtained by Worthy News, the heavily armed Hagari began by showing a house that he said was used by a key Hamas commander. “I am here in Gaza City. We are here next to the house of a terrorist. This is one of the senior terrorists who is the head of the operational naval operations that led the raids into Israel. His house is right next to a school,” he said, showing the area. His house is 200 yards (183 meters) from the Rantisi hospital,” he added. “Next to his house, there is a tunnel. “Now, I want to show you an operational tunnel built with electricity. We first saw the solar panels, then the electricity goes here,” Hagari explained.
The tunnel is more than 20 meters (22 yards) below the surface, he said. “The robot found a door that is bullet and explosives proof. So, it looks like hard evidence that the hospital’s direction is connected to the operations. It is a covered tunnel, so nobody can find it.”
The army has claimed that Hamas is also operating inside and near Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest and most equipped hospital, and underneath in bunkers, some of which it claims are accessible from the hospital itself.
It also said that hundreds of Hamas fighters sought shelter at Al-Shifa after the October 7 massacre, known as Black Sabbat in Israel.
Hospital staff has denied Hamas used the hospital. Still, it was unclear whether they spoke under duress as the group, deemed a terrorist organization by most Western countries, rules the Gaza Strip.
UNVEILING MAPS
Hagari last month unveiled maps showing where Israel believes Hamas’ underground command centers are located, including one next to the hospital’s reception area and another next to the dialysis department.
Israel also released a video of what it said was a captured militant answering questions during an interrogation. The militant, who critics say was under duress, said that most tunnels are “hidden in hospitals.”
“At [Al-] Shifa, for example, there are underground levels,” the militant said. “[Al-]Shifa is not small. It’s a big place that can hide things.”
The army also released a voice recording of what it claimed were two anonymous Palestinians in Gaza discussing the presence of a tunnel under the hospital.
Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, rejected the Israeli claims of his gunmen hiding beneath sites such as Al-Shifa as “false and misleading propaganda.”
“The occupying forces have no evidence to prove it,” Hamad said. “We have never used civilians as human shields because it goes against our religion, morality, and principles,” he added, despite his group keeping more than 200 hostages and carrying out massacres in Israel.
Israel on Sunday said it had tried to deliver some 300 liters (about 80 gallons) of fuel to the Al-Shifa Hospital in plastic containers several hundred meters (yards) from the facility. But as of Monday, the fuel had apparently not been taken.
PREVENTING MEDICAL WORKERS
Israel accused Hamas of preventing medical workers from retrieving the containers. Hospital officials said the fuel “should be delivered by the Palestinian Red Crescent” and that the quantity of fuel was insufficient in any case.
Israel offered safe passage for people to leave, but some of those who tried to go described a “terrifying” experience.
Goudhat Samy al-Madhoun, a healthcare worker, told media that some 50 people left the facility on Monday, including a woman who had been receiving kidney dialysis. He said Israeli forces “fired on the group” several times, wounding one man who had to be left behind.
Radio recordings obtained by Worthy News suggested that Israel’s army wants people to leave hospitals with hands in the air.
However, the apparent communications among soldiers near Rantisi Hospital suggested there were “armed men” among the internally displaced people.
Israel has made clear it does not want to take over hospitals but to destroy Hamas and its infrastructure, including in Al-Shafi, where a standoff continued on Tuesday.
Al-Shifa is the leading hospital in Gaza’s fragile health care system that staff says has collapsed mainly after years of conflict. There has been chronic underfunding despite massive international aid that critics say often ends up at the Palestinian and Hamas leadership.
BLOCKADES IMPACT GAZA
The Israeli-Egyptian blockades aimed at weakening Hamas also added to recent difficulties, though Israel’s army says humanitarian fuel deliveries have been used by Hamas to fire rockets at Israel.
Al-Shifa boasts over 500 beds and services like MRI scans, dialysis, and an intensive care unit. It conducts roughly half of all the medical operations that take place in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
After the war erupted, thousands crammed into the hospital grounds to seek shelter, according to several sources. As the war moved closer to the hospital, most of those huddling there fled south — joining some two-thirds of the territory’s 2.3 million residents who had left their homes.
But hundreds of people, including medical workers, premature babies, and other vulnerable patients, remain, staffers say.
On Saturday, the hospital announced that it had run out of fuel. Health officials said at least 32 patients, including three babies, have died. They say 36 other babies are at risk of dying because life-saving equipment can’t function. Israel has offered safe evacuations of the babies.
It wasn’t clear why the evacuations had not happened Tuesday, with critical observers suggesting Hamas wants to use the dire hospital situation in its “propaganda against Israel,” which it seeks to destroy.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry released a photo Monday showing about a dozen premature babies wrapped in blankets on a bed to keep them warm. “I hope that they will remain alive despite the disaster which this hospital is passing through,” said ministry spokesman Medhat Abbas.
INTERNATIONAL LAW
International law gives hospitals special protections during war. But hospitals can lose those protections if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Still, critics say there must be plenty of warning to allow the evacuation of staff and patients, which Israel says it does.
If harm to civilians from an attack is “disproportionate” to the military objective, it is illegal under international law, according to experts. Israel said it does not target civilians but stressed that Hamas should not expect immunity.
“We’re not looking to take control of hospitals. We’re looking to dismantle their infrastructure,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, another Israeli army spokesman. “We’ll go in, we’ll do what we have to do and leave,” he added. “What it’s going to look like, it’s hard to say.”
However, U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday said the hospital “must be protected” and called for “less intrusive action” by Israeli forces. “It is my hope and expectation that there will be less intrusive action,” Biden said in the Oval Office without elaborating.
As fighting continued, Israel’s Golani Brigade soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shared a photo on Monday displaying the Israeli flag inside the Hamas parliament building in Gaza. Israeli sources said the act “symbolizes Hamas’s loss of control in the enclave,” with Israel hoping to see a legitimate government in charge of the territory.
In the United States, pro-Palestinian groups filed lawsuits against President Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, accusing them of complicity in the Israeli government’s “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza.
One lawsuit argues that these actions violate international law, including the 1948 Genocide Convention and the corresponding Genocide Convention Implementation Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1988. Israel says it is responding to the worst atrocity and genocide against Jews since the Holocaust, also known as Shoah, which included the killing of babies and toddlers by Hamas.
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