Like a film: Israeli hit squad kills terror cell
GAZA STRIP: Israeli undercover troops raided a hospital in the West Bank disguised as medical staff and civilians and killed three Palestinian men the army said were members of a “terrorist cell”.
While they conducted their hospital raid in the north, Israel said it was flooding Hamas’s attack tunnels in Gaza, despite fears Israeli hostages are still being kept in the vast underground network.
Some of the Israeli agents at the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin were dressed as medical staff and carried a wheelchair and baby carrier as props, according to officials and hospital CCTV footage released by the Palestinian health ministry.
Hamas said one of the three killed, Muhammad Jalamnah, was a commander in its armed wing. The Israeli army said Jalamnah had “planned to carry out a terror attack in the immediate future and used the hospital as a hiding place”.
CCTV footage showed members of the undercover unit – men and women – disguised as medics and civilians making their way through a corridor with rifles raised.
The Palestinian Authority’s ministry of health accused Israel of carrying out a “new massacre inside hospitals”.
Hamas said the Israeli forces had “executed three fightmen including one of its members. Another armed group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said two of those killed were its members and were brothers, Muhammad Ayman Ghazawi and Basel Ayman Ghazawi.
Images from the room where the men are said to have been shot show blood-spattered floors and walls with a bloodied, blue pillow with a bullet hole in it on a bed.
“They executed the three as they slept in the room,” the hospital’s director, Dr Naji Nazzal, told Reuters.
It came as the Israeli military said it had adopted the tactic of channelling water into Hamas’s vast underground network of tunnels, dubbed “the Gaza metro”.
“It is part of a range of tools deployed by the Israeli Defence Forces to neutralise the threat of Hamas’s subterranean tunnel network,” it said.
At the start of the IsraelHamas war in October, there were 1300 tunnels stretching over 500km in Gaza, according to a study from US military academy West Point.
The army vowed to destroy them after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, even though the military says many of the hostages taken by Hamas have been or continue to be held in the network of tunnels.
About 250 foreign and Israers”, eli hostages were taken to Gaza during the October 7 attack, of which around 132 are still held captive, including bodies of at least 28 people believed to have been killed.
In December, some Israeli media said the army was leaning towards flooding the tunnels with seawater pumped from the Mediterranean, but experts warned it posed huge risks to civilians.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military said it had taken care not to “damage the area’s groundwater”.
Meanwhile, Hamas said it had received a proposed framework for a ceasefire and a plan to release more of the hostages that came out of high-level talks in Paris between top US, Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials.
Hamas said it was “in the process of examining it and delivering its response”.