Israel finds hostages, tunnels and weapons at hospital in Gaza

Once a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa hospital has been evacuated of patients and staff since Israeli troops swept in last week, on what they say is a mission to root out Hamas hideouts.

Israel finds hostages and gunmen at Gaza's largest hospital, photo 1 — 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 brought back to Gaza after the October 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel that sparked the war.

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 without any marks except 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 held hostage in 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, to the surprise of medical staff. 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, has 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 part of 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 weapons and ammunition.

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

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

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