On 28 October a video provided by the Israeli military confirmed that the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas has a bunker beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is the largest hospital in Gaza. It showed excerpts from the interrogation of two assailants who participated in the 7 October massacre in southern Israel.
The footage was made public one day after Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari stated that Hamas’s primary operating headquarters was beneath the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and that the group’s operations were documented with images and audio that had been intercepted. The clips were with English subtitles and featured the captives being questioned.
One of them, Amar Sammy Marzuk Abu A’yoah told his interrogator that he is a member of Hamas’s naval commando force, the Nukhba and belongs to Gaza City’s Tuffah region. He revealed about the network of Hamas tunnels and pointed out that they pass under residential areas, however, not all neighbourhoods have entrances. He clarified that tunnels are concealed beneath hospitals and mentioned that Shifa Hospital has “underground levels.”
He noted, “Shifa is not small, it is a big place that can be used to hide things.” He asserted that Hamas takes advantage of hospitals, clinics and other medical facilities because it knows that Israel won’t attack them. The terrorist organisation utilise the establishments to transfer “explosives, weapons, food and medical equipment.” He added, “Shifa is a safe place, it will not be struck. To them it is safe. That’s what we know.”
“First they (Hamas) worry about the machines and their jeeps and then they give to the people,” he confirmed another Israeli allegation that Hamas was stockpiling gasoline instead of delivering it to Gazans. He proclaimed that anybody seeking to depart Gaza through Egypt must obtain the outfit’s authorisation in order to do so.
A man identifying himself as combat medic Hassan Hassn Hassin Za’areb appears in another video. According to him, he was involved in the attacks on Kibbutz Sufa, a community close to the Gaza border where armed individuals went from house to house murdering every individual they could find.
“According to what I’ve heard, the Shifa hospital, they’re using it, they’re hiding there. But I don’t know about Najar,” he highlighted and named another medical centre in the Gaza city of Rafah.
IDF releases footage of the interrogation of Hamas terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre in southern Israel, where they reveal that the terror group has a hideout under Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. pic.twitter.com/kCwKOBWUGr
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) October 28, 2023
IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced on 27 October that Hamas possesses multiple subterranean structures beneath Shifa, which serve as bases for the terrorist organization’s leaders to orchestrate assaults on Israel. The military spokesman reports that Israel believed that it had concrete evidence that many terrorists took refuge in the hospital following the 7 October assault.
Approximately 2,500 terrorists used a constant barrage of rockets to infiltrate the border in order to carry out the deadly attack following which they launched a devastating rampage through more than 20 nearby communities in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip. Around 1,400 individuals lost their lives with the majority being innocent civilians as they were brutally killed in their homes as well as in an outdoor music event. A total of more than 220 individuals were also taken to Gaza as hostages by the terrorists.
Israel has made a commitment to wipe out Hamas in response to the attack while actively seeking to minimize harm to innocent civilians. An extensive bombardment has been conducted on terrorist objectives as a preemptive measure before a potential invasion by ground forces. Hamas and other terrorist groups continue to fire rockets into southern and central Israel which resulted in an increase in the number of victims and fatalities.
The IDF alleged that Hamas’s internal security operates a command centre within Shifa Hospital from where it stocks up on weapons and executes rocket attacks into Israel. According to Daniel Hagari, Hamas is employing the hospital’s energy infrastructure as part of its underground base. He alleged that the terrorist group is using the hospital which has 1,500 beds and the people inside it including around 4,000 staff members as human shields.
Arab and Western officials notified The New York Times recently that Hamas is hoarding essential supplies like food and fuel in the Gaza Strip, depriving the desperate residents of accessing them. On 27 October, the officials informed the newspaper that the terror group had gathered supplies within its extensive tunnel network.
While Hamas has an extensive network of tunnels under Gaza, which is virtually an entire underground city, the group is not using it to protect civilians from Israeli bombings. The tunnels are for the exclusive use of terrorists.
The anonymous sources claimed that in addition to food, medicine and water reserves, Hamas controlled hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel that it used to power trucks, rockets and other military equipment. The publication was informed by a top Lebanese official that Hamas owned sufficient supplies to allow the outfit to fight for three to four months without requiring reinforcements.
The authorities talked to the newspaper without disclosing their identities in order to protect their sources. The IDF published images earlier this week that appeared to display fuel tanks in the Gaza Strip and declared that it had reliable information that Hamas was keeping about 500,000 litres of fuel in storage there. The military charged that Hamas is taking fuel from the civilian population in Gaza.
After Hamas unleashed the atrocities on Israel on 7 October, the Jewish state which routinely supplied fuel to Gaza stopped all of the deliveries and stressed that it would allow Palestinian civilians to enter southern Gaza from Egypt with food, water, and medical supplies but not fuel so provided as the items do not reach Hamas.
Without a gasoline supply, hospitals and other crucial amenities in the Palestinian territory run the risk of collapsing. The IDF insisted that it is actively monitoring the situation and that there isn’t a humanitarian crisis in Gaza right now. The health ministry operated by Hamas in the Gaza Strip has revealed numbers claiming that over 7,000 people have died there since Israel initiated retaliatory air and artillery attacks on the day of the onslaught.
These figures which include Palestinian terrorists murdered by Israel and Palestinian civilians killed by misdirected rockets fired by terror organisations in Gaza, cannot be independently confirmed. 1,500 Hamas terrorists were reportedly killed by Israel on and after 7 October.
