Israeli forces raid Gaza hospital
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: Israeli forces launched an operation early on Monday in and around Al-Shifa Hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest medical facility, with witnesses reporting airstrikes and tanks near the complex crowded with patients and displaced people.
The predawn raid came at a time of growing concern over a looming Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, and as international mediators and envoys readied to meet in Qatar to revive stalled truce talks.
A meeting between Israel’s Mossad chief David Barnea, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Egyptian officials was “expected to take place” on Monday, a source said on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the talks.
The Israeli military told Gazans to immediately evacuate from AlShifa in northern Gaza City after it launched the raid based on what the army termed intelligence “indicating the use of the hospital by senior Hamas terrorists.”
Witnesses told Agence FrancePresse (AFP) that the Israeli forces had dropped Arabic-language leaflets with the same evacuation instructions and a warning that “You are in a dangerous combat zone!”
Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry said residents near the hospital in the largely devastated city had reported dozens of casualties who could not be helped “due to the intensity of gunfire and artillery shelling.”
The Hamas government media office condemned as a “war crime” the “storming of the Al-Shifa medical complex with tanks, drones and weapons, and shooting inside,” where thousands of displaced Palestinians were taking shelter.
The army and the Shin Bet security service said Israeli troops had “identified terrorist fire toward them from a number of hospital buildings. The forces engaged the terrorists and identified several hits.”
Israel’s military also said troops had been told to “avoid harm to the patients, civilians, medical staff and medical equipment,” with Arabic speakers deployed to “facilitate dialogue with the patients remaining in the hospital.”
The army previously raided AlShifa in mid-November, sparking an international outcry, in an operation in which it said its troops had found weapons and other military equipment in rooms in and below the hospital.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas launched unprecedented attacks on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures showed.
The Palestinian militant group also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 who are presumed dead.
Vowing to destroy Hamas and free the captives, Israel has carried out a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive that Gaza’s Health Ministry says has killed at least 31,726 people, most of them women and children.
Fear of Rafah invasion
An Israeli siege that cut off water, electricity, fuel and basic supplies has brought large-scale shortages in the territory of 2.4 million people that the United Nations warns is on the brink of famine.
Overland access for aid convoys from Egypt has been limited amid the bombing, ground combat and growing insecurity in Gaza, where some vehicles have been looted by desperate crowds.
The United States, Jordan and other western and Arab countries have airdropped food into Gaza, while a first aid vessel sailing from the Mediterranean island-nation of Cyprus has opened a new maritime corridor for humanitarian relief goods.
Halting efforts toward a truce and hostage release deal, which have involved US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators, were expected to resume in Qatar, following a weeklong ceasefire in November.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has again vowed, in the face of growing global concern, that the army will finish its operation to destroy Hamas, before or after any truce.
Global alarm has focused on Rafah, near the Egyptian border, where about 1.5 million Palestinians now live in crowded shelters and tent cities.
Netanyahu’s warnings of a looming ground invasion have raised fears that civilians would be in the line of fire, sparking warnings of a potential “slaughter.”
The Israeli premier on Sunday reiterated that civilians would be evacuated from Rafah before any ground attack, without detailing where they would go in the largely devastated coastal strip.
“Our goal in eliminating the remaining terrorist battalions in Rafah goes hand-in-hand with enabling the civilian population to leave Rafah,” he said during a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“It’s not something that we will do while keeping the population locked in place,” he added.
Scholz, like others before him, raised the question: “Where should they go?”
The German leader later told reporters that if a Rafah offensive resulted in “a large number of casualties,” this “would make any peaceful development in the region very difficult.”