The Israeli military said its troops had entered the grounds of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, early Wednesday, hours after a White House official said that U.S. intelligence supported Israel’s claims that Hamas was operating out of the complex.
Thousands of civilians are sheltering at the hospital, along with gravely ill patients and premature infants whose care has been interrupted. Fuel and medical supplies have dwindled as Israeli troops drew nearer in recent days.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that it had launched “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area in the Shifa Hospital,” after weeks of accusing the group of operating out of departments in the hospital as well as in sprawling underground tunnels beneath the complex.
Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, has denied that was the case, and hospital officials have also refuted the allegation.
There was no immediate information on the scope, scale or timeline of Israel’s operation inside the hospital. Efforts to reach physicians and officials inside the hospital early Wednesday were unsuccessful.
Hamas released a statement saying it holds Israel’s army and President Biden “fully responsible” for the raid, saying the White House had given Israel “a green light” with Mr. Kirby’s comments.
The White House did not immediately respond, pointing to Mr. Kirby’s earlier comments that the United States would not back an Israeli airstrike on any hospitals.
“We don’t want to see a firefight in a hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people trying to get medical care they deserve are caught in the crossfire,” he said on Air Force One. Even if Hamas’s effort to embed itself near civilian institutions posed an “added burden” to the Israeli military, he said, “Hamas’s actions do not lessen Israel’s responsibilities to protect civilians in Gaza.”
Mai al-Kaila, the minister of health for the Palestinian Authority, said Israeli forces “are committing a new crime against humanity, medical staff and patients,” according to Wafa, the Palestinian news agency. She said the Palestinian government, which controls part of the West Bank but not Gaza, holds Israeli forces “responsible for the lives of the medical staff, patients, and displaced people in Al-Shifa complex.”
Before the raid, hospital officials described grim conditions for patients, as fuel for generators ran out, shutting down lifesaving equipment. Medicine, anesthetics and other supplies are all but gone. At particular risk are roughly three dozen premature babies whose incubators were turned off.
The hospital’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said that doctors had performed surgeries on Monday without anesthesia and oxygen and that patients had died. The hospital had to bury decomposing bodies on the grounds, he and Gazan health officials said.
The Israeli military said that the goal of the raid Wednesday was not to harm civilians and that their troops were accompanied by medical teams and Arabic speakers.
The military said in a statement said the “relevant authorities in Gaza” had been warned on Monday that “all military activities within the hospital must cease within 12 hours and that it had not.
Israel is pressing its case that Hamas is using hospitals as cover, releasing a pair of videos from inside Gaza’s main children’s hospital that showed weapons and explosives purportedly found in the medical center, and a room where the military said hostages were kept.
While the Health Ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, on Tuesday disputed nearly every assertion made in the initial Israeli video, it acknowledged that the footage was taken from inside Al-Rantisi Specialized Hospital for Children in northern Gaza. The remaining patients and staff are believed to have left the hospital over the weekend after it was surrounded by Israeli forces.
U.S. intelligence supports the Israeli allegation of Hamas operating within and beneath hospitals, a National Security Council spokesman said on Tuesday.
Israeli troops entered shortly thereafter, and took videos that the military released on Monday and Tuesday as part of a campaign to persuade skeptics that Hamas had turned hospitals into safe houses and command centers and has built tunnels underneath them.
“This is not the last hospital like this in Gaza, and the world should know that,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman. “It’s a crime.”
In the first of the videos, a six-minute presentation released on Monday, Admiral Hagari walks viewers through what he says was found in the basement of the hospital. The Israeli military followed that on Tuesday with a second video, just over two minutes long, posted on X, formerly Twitter. That video purports to show troops rushing into the building and appearing to find explosives, weapons and the room where Admiral Hagari said hostages were kept.
Both videos contained a series of assertions that could not be independently verified. The first includes well-displayed evidence — guns, explosives and other weaponry all arranged as if by police showing the haul from a drug raid — whose provenance similarly could not be confirmed.
The second, though, shows troops in action appearing to find the weaponry that would be showcased in the longer video.
Osama Hamadan, a Hamas spokesman, speaking at a news conference from Beirut on Tuesday called Admiral Hagari’s presentation a “lie and charade.” There was no immediate comment from Gazan officials or Hamas on the second video.
Monday’s video included footage of a piece of paper taped to a wall in the hospital’s basement. Admiral Hagari said the paper — a grid with Arabic words and numbers within each square — could be a schedule for guarding hostages “where every terrorist writes his name.”
The paper included a mark that appeared to be an illegible signature, but did not seem to otherwise include people’s names — the Arabic words were days of the week and numbers underneath dates. The Gazan Health Ministry said in a statement that the paper, including days and dates, was nothing more than “a regular work shift timetable, a standard administrative practice in hospitals.”
The ministry, however, failed to address one key detail: The calendar begins on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and an Arabic title written at the top uses the militants’ name for the assault: “Al Aqsa Flood Battle, 7/10/2023.”
Dr. Mustafa Al Kahlout, the hospital’s director, said on Tuesday that families fleeing Israeli bombardment have sought shelter at Al-Rantisi and other Gazan hospitals. He called on the Red Cross and other international organizations to “inspect all part of the hospitals.”
The video released on Monday by the Israeli military opens with Admiral Hagari standing a few hundred yards from Al-Rantisi. Speaking in English, he points out what he says is the house of a senior Hamas leader, a school next door and a pile of rubble under which there is the entrance to a tunnel that purportedly runs toward the hospital.
The video then cuts to Admiral Hagari inside what he says is the hospital basement. He enters a room with children’s drawings on blue and pink walls. Neatly laid out on the floor is an array of weapons that he says were found in the hospital.
Admiral Hagari then shows what he says is an area connected to the hospital basement where hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack were purportedly held.
There is a windowless room with couches and curtains covering bare walls where he says hostage videos could be made. There is a chair with a rope on the floor next to it, an “improvised toilet,” a baby bottle and a package of diapers. There is also a motorcycle that he says was used to carry hostages back to Gaza.
“You don’t build an improvised toilet in the basement, unless you want to build an infrastructure to hold hostages,” Admiral Hagari says.
As for what happened to the hostages and Hamas fighters who were purportedly at the hospital, he says, “They might have left with the patients, they might have run away through tunnels and we have signs that they had hostages with them. It’s still under investigation, but there’s enough signs to indicate that.”
For its part, the Gazan Health Ministry said the basement rooms shown were used as shelters “for those fleeing airstrikes. The bathroom shown is a necessity.”
Kirby declined to provide details about the U.S. intelligence, but he made clear that it goes beyond the information collected by the Israeli intelligence service. “It comes from a variety of intelligence methods — of our own, of our own,” he said, adding that the classification of the intelligence had been downgraded so that it could be shared publicly.
“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” Mr. Kirby told reporters on Air Force One as President Biden headed to San Francisco for a summit with Asia-Pacific leaders.
“Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad — J.I.D. — members operate a command and control node from Al-Shifa in Gaza City,” he added. “They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.”
The revelation of the U.S. intelligence comes as Israel is under harsh international criticism for attacks on and around hospitals as it conducts a war against Hamas in the wake of the armed group’s terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7. Israel says more than 1,200 people were killed in the attacks and that 239 others remain hostages.
During Israel’s ensuing military campaign to eradicate Hamas, it has repeatedly said that its military seeks to avoid casualties among civilians, including patients and doctors at hospitals. But they have insisted that Hamas uses such people as human shields.
Mr. Kirby said that the United States does not support attacks from the air on hospitals, despite what he said was the confirmed use of the facilities by Hamas.
“We do not support striking a hospital from the air,” he said. “And we do not want to see a firefight in a hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve, not to be caught in a crossfire. Hospitals and patients must be protected.”
He called that concern an “added burden” for Israel in its military campaign against Hamas.
Palestinian officials and doctors at Al-Shifa have denied that the hospital has been used by Hamas. But Mr. Kirby said that the newly revealed U.S. intelligence supported Israel’s arguments as its military closed in on the hospital.
“We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control node and probably storage of equipment weapons up underneath,” he said. “That is a war crime.”
Workers at Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in Gaza City, buried dozens of bodies in a mass grave on its complex on Tuesday because they had started to decompose and posed a health hazard, according to medical authorities in Gaza, signaling the increasingly dire conditions at the facility amid Israel’s military campaign to eradicate Hamas.
The World Health Organization has said that Al-Shifa can no longer function as a hospital because of a lack of electricity, fuel and water and on Tuesday repeated its calls for a cease-fire. Doctors and the health ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, have reported harrowing conditions inside the complex. A number of other hospitals have shut down under the Israeli assault.
Al-Shifa’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said on the WhatsApp messaging service that doctors at the hospital had performed surgeries on Monday without anesthesia or oxygen and that multiple people had died at the medical complex. He added that health workers were forced to bury bodies inside the grounds because “there was no consent to take them out” and that the grave being dug would not be sufficient for all of them.
Medical teams at the hospital buried more than 80 people at the hospital complex, according to Gaza’s government press office.
Gaza’s deputy health minister, Dr. Yousef Abu al-Reesh, said on WhatsApp that Israeli forces were preventing the removal of bodies from the complex for burial.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the claim. Israel has imposed a siege on Gaza and cut off the electricity it provided to Gaza after Oct. 7, when Hamas launched terrorist attacks from the enclave that, according to Israeli authorities, killed around 1,200 people in Israel.
Israel asserts that Hamas has dug a network of tunnels beneath the hospital, which Hamas denies. The Israeli military has surrounded the facility and is fighting ground battles with the group as part of its broader invasion.
A health ministry spokesman, Dr. Medhat Abbas, said this week that more than 100 bodies were in the hospital’s front yard, another 50 were inside and about 60 others were in a morgue. Overall, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s military offensive, according to the territory’s health ministry.
The W.H.O. said on Tuesday that a cease-fire was needed to alleviate suffering at the hospital, citing massive overcrowding, insufficient food and clean water for 700 patients and 400 staff members and a lack of fuel needed to run the generators that would enable medical equipment to function.
“We are begging for a cease-fire to happen now,” Margaret Harris, a W.H.O. spokeswoman told reporters in Geneva. The organization has recorded 137 attacks on hospitals and health care facilities in Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and has criticized calls by Israel to evacuate the hospital, arguing that doing so would be in effect a death sentence for the most critically ill.
“You are asking doctors and nurses to move people knowing that that would kill them,” Ms. Harris said. “Why would you need to move them? A hospital should never be under attack.” She said that 20 patients had died at the hospital in the previous 48 hours.
Israeli forces control “the aboveground area” of the northern Gaza Strip, the defense minister said on Tuesday, and may turn toward southern Gaza, anticipating “long months” of fighting ahead against Hamas.
“In northern Gaza, Hamas has lost control,” the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters.
But he made a vital distinction between control above ground and control below, where Hamas militants have built a maze of tactical tunnels, command posts and supply depots. The Israeli military says it has identified hundreds of tunnel shafts in the Gaza Strip since the invasion began.
In a ground invasion that began on Oct. 27, the Israeli military has moved into northern Gaza from multiple directions, trying to trap Hamas fighters in a tightening loop centered on Gaza City, where street battles have raged for days. Israel has told civilians to evacuate northern Gaza and flee southward, which more than a million people have heeded.
When asked whether Israeli troops would operate in southern Gaza as they have in the north, Mr. Gallant said the combat plans he had presented to Israel’s cabinet before the beginning of the ground invasion had required “long months” of fighting and included “both the north and the south.”
In recent days, Israeli forces secured control of various Hamas centers of operations, including government buildings, police headquarters and an engineering facility “used for weapons production and development,” according to a statement made by the Israeli military.
Some of the outposts, including the Governor’s Residence, were used by Hamas before it led the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said in a post on X, formally known as Twitter.
Once inside the Governor’s Residence, military forces found equipment, including weapons, stolen by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack, Admiral Hagari said in another post on X. Those weapons will be examined by the Israeli military, he said.
President Biden sent a message Tuesday to families of hostages abducted from Israel on Oct. 7: “Hang in there. We’re coming.”
The Israeli military has said that 239 people who were taken from Israel during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attack remain hostages, and American officials say Israel counts nine Americans among them. Hamas has said that other groups are holding some of the hostages, but it is not clear how many.
Biden has said that freeing the hostages is a top priority, and administration officials have said the United States is actively engaged in indirect negotiations involving Israel, Qatar and Hamas to secure their release.
“I’ve been talking to the people involved every single day,” Mr. Biden said during an event in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on Tuesday. “I believe it’s going to happen, but I don’t want to get into any detail.”
Asked if he had a message for the hostages and their families, he said, “Hang in there. We’re coming.”
As he spoke, thousands of people were rallying in a March for Israel on the National Mall in Washington that was organized in support of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and others gathered near the White House carrying posters of children who were kidnapped in the Oct. 7 attack.
Brett McGurk, Mr. Biden’s senior Middle East adviser, was heading to the Middle East after stopping in Belgium on Tuesday, the White House said, to brief NATO allies and E.U. partners and coordinate efforts to secure the release of the hostages as well as to expand humanitarian aid to Gaza and increase economic pressure on Hamas and other terrorist groups. His next stops will include Israel, the West Bank, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan, the White House said.
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said last weekend that the status of the hostages was unclear.
“We know the number of missing and that’s the number the Israelis have given but we don’t know how many of those are still alive,” Mr. Sullivan told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“As far as the Americans are concerned, there are nine missing American citizens” and one permanent U.S. resident, he said. He added, “That’s the number that we are working with, that’s the number we are trying to ensure the safe return of,” he said.
The Israeli government has said the hostages include 20 children and 10 to 20 people over the age of 60. One of the young hostages, according to the White House, is a 3-year-old American.
The news of the 3-year-old came in a White House readout of a call about the Israel-Hamas war between Mr. Biden and Amir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar on Sunday. In the call, according to the readout, the president “condemned unequivocally the holding of hostages by Hamas, including many young children, one of whom is a 3-year old American citizen toddler, whose parents were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7.”
Tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington on Tuesday to show solidarity with Israel as it wages war in response to a brutal assault by Hamas.
The rally, called the March for Israel, comes after large protests across the United States and in world capitals against the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which has been plunged into a humanitarian crisis.
The event is intended by organizers in part as a response to critics of Israel, where officials estimate that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Jewish schools, synagogues and community centers from across the country sent busloads of attendees.
Shortly after the gates opened on Tuesday morning, the Mall was crowded with people waving American and Israeli flags and holding signs declaring support.
Educators, artists, students and relatives of some of the hundreds of hostages seized by Hamas are scheduled to appear, along with the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, and U.S. lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.
Most U.S. lawmakers have rejected calls for a cease-fire in Gaza and maintain that Israel’s military campaign — which the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip says has killed more than 10,000 people — is justified by the imperative to eradicate Hamas.
But there has been growing pushback in congressional offices and the Biden administration, as well as among Democratic voters generally, over how the war has unfolded and its toll on noncombatants, especially children.
Eric Fingerhut, president of the Jewish Federations of North America, said the march was intended in part to remind the politicians in Washington that “the majority of the American people” support Israel’s actions, even if they disagree on other issues.
It was also meant to show unity in the face of a rising number of antisemitic incidents across the country in recent weeks, he said.
In a ward in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, all too close to pitched battles between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen, lie some of the Palestinian enclave’s most vulnerable people, hospital officials say: roughly three dozen premature babies, the incubators needed to keep them alive now without power.
Al-Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital complex, has been cut off from electricity for days. Israel has not allowed fuel — which could power generators — into Gaza, arguing that Hamas, which rules the territory, has ample reserves and would divert additional shipments for military purposes.
On Saturday, Palestinian health officials announced that one baby who had been born premature had died at the hospital. Unless power was restored to keep the incubators running, the others could face the same fate, Dr. Mai al-Kaila, the health minister for the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, said.
The fighting around Al-Shifa has intensified as Israeli troops advance to the hospital’s gates. Israeli and American officials say the hospital hosts an underground Hamas military command center, suggesting the Israeli military intends eventually to storm the site. Hamas and hospital officials have rejected the claims.
As Israel’s aerial bombardments intensified in October, more than 60,000 displaced people were sheltering inside Al-Shifa’s sprawling complex. Israeli authorities have been calling on Palestinian civilians to leave the north, and as the fighting drew nearer last week — including four strikes inside the complex — many holdouts, both patients and staff members, finally fled, according to the Gaza health ministry.
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