Israeli army says footage shows foreign hostages inside Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital
Israel’s military has released video footage that it says shows two hostages being taken into Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital on 7 Octoberwhile there are growing hopes that a deal to release a significant number of hostages could be agreed.
R Adm Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the military, released CCTV video that appeared to show a group of men taking one individual into a hospital, to the surprise of medical staff.
A second clip showed an injured man on a hospital trolley. The IDF said the two hostages were a Nepalese citizen and a Thai citizen, who were not named.
Hagari said on Sunday night that this was “concrete evidence” that hostages were taken into al-Shifa hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza city, from where it says Hamas runs military operations from bunkers and tunnels below ground.
Hamas and hospital staff deny that the hospital, which has been surrounded by Israeli forces for more than a week, was used as a command centre. Israeli raids on the hospital have provoked international condemnation.
The health ministry in Gaza said it was not able to confirm the authenticity of the footage of the two hostages aired by the IDF, according to the BBC. Hamas’s leadership did not immediately comment on the claims.
The Palestinian Islamist group has previously said it took some hostages to hospitals for treatment. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the video released by Israel.
Hagari also said another hostage, a 19-year-old Israeli army conscript named Noa Marciano, was killed by Hamas inside the hospital.
“According to intelligence information – solid intelligence information – Noa was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa hospital. There, she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist,” Hagari said. He did not elaborate.
Hamas has previously blamed an Israeli airstrike for her death, issuing a video that appeared to show her body, unmarked except for a head wound, an account that Hagari was seeking to challenge.
The IDF said on Sunday that a preliminary pathological report and intelligence suggested the airstrike injury to Marciano had not been life threatening and that she was killed by Hamas. Her body was recovered near the Shifa hospital last week.
On Monday, fighting was reported to be closing in around another medical facility, the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza. The health ministry in Gaza said 12 people had been killed “as a result of the Israeli occupation targeting the Indonesian hospital”. There was no immediate comment from the IDF.
The latest claims come amid signs that Israel and Hamas may be edging towards a deal in talks brokered by Qatar that would lead to the release of a significant number of hostages, possibly in return for a limited ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Israel is still searching for about 240 people that Hamas kidnapped and took to Gaza after the cross-border assault that sparked the war. Some have been killed in the subsequent fighting, and there is public pressure in Israel to find a way to ensure survivors are released.
Senior US and Israeli officials and the Qatari prime minister all suggested that an agreement was close on Sunday, although observers have cautioned that public statements during such negotiations are often misleading and any potential deal could easily collapse.
Al-Shifa hospital has been a focus of Israel’s six-week offensive since the attacks by Hamas in which 1,200 people were killed. Israel’s retaliatory strikes have killed 13,000 people, more than 5,000 of them children, according to the Hamas government, which seized control of Gaza in 2007.
The World Health Organization said the hospital had become a “death zone”, with a mass grave at the entrance and only 25 staff left to care for 291 seriously ill patients.
On Sunday, the IDF separately released video footage that it said showed the first solid evidence of a sophisticated Hamas tunnel network underneath the Shifa hospital complex.
It said troops operating near the in-patients building at al-Shifa found a booby-trapped pickup truck in a garage inside the medical complex’s walls. When it was destroyed in a controlled explosion, a tunnel was exposed beneath the floor of the garage, the IDF said, providing photographs.
In footage dated 16 and 17 November taken by army robots, a tunnel shaft about 10 metres long is navigated by a rickety circular staircase, before it reaches a 55-metre-long tunnel. The tunnel contains electricity wires and slopes downwards until it ends at a blast-proof door, with a small slot through which to fire weapons. The IDF says it is yet to reach beyond the door.
Until Sunday, the IDF had displayed what it said were weapons found after searches of the grounds but was yet to produce evidence to back up claims of a vast tunnel complex located beneath the hospital.
Hamas does acknowledge that it has a network of hundreds of kilometres of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts throughout the Palestinian territory, but says these are not located in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
With Reuters