Infants moved from hospital that Israel raided
Four days after it was seized by Israeli troops, the Gaza Strip's largest hospital has become a “death zone,” the World Health Organization said, as 31 premature babies in extremely precarious health there were evacuated Sunday.
Emergency medical workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, transported the babies by ambulance from the hospital, Shifa in Gaza City, to the neonatal intensive care unit of a hospital in the city of Rafah, about 25 miles away in southern Gaza.
Officials in Gaza and Egypt have said the babies will then be brought to Egypt for treatment, though the timing was unclear.
The infants have captured global attention, coming to symbolize what Israel's critics call the recklessness of its assault, and the heavy toll that has fallen on the most vulnerable since the military began pounding Gaza. The military campaign began after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 that, the Israelis say, killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel.
The assailants also seized more than 200 others as hostages, the Israelis say, and took them back to Gaza. Negotiations aimed at releasing at least some of the hostages and observing a cease-fire were still underway Sunday night.
Since the war began, more than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including more than 4,000 children, according to health officials in the Hamas-run territory.
The storming of Shifa last week was a critical moment for Israel as it sought to expose what it called a Hamas military hub there amid searing international criticism over the Israeli decision to raid a medical center. On Sunday, the Israeli
military released new videos that it said supported its contention that Hamas had been using the hospital to shelter fighters and store weapons, and to plan attacks.
Both the Palestinian armed group and Shifa officials have denied that Hamas had an underground command center there.
Last week, Israeli military took journalists from
The New York Times to the hospital grounds to see the entrance to a stone-and-concrete shaft that it offered as evidence of a subterranean Hamas military operation. At the time, an Israeli commander said that soldiers, fearing booby traps, had not ventured down the shaft.
On Sunday, Israel's military released two videos of what it said had been found inside the shaft: a 180-foot section of tunnel running about 30 feet below the Shifa complex.
One of the videos, which appears to have been filmed by a drone, shows parts of a metal spiral staircase. A second, longer video starts out above ground and shows the descent to a cloister-like tunnel with cables along one wall that leads to what the Israeli military called a “blastproof door.”
The door had a “firing hole” in it, Israeli military said. Such doors, it said, are used by Hamas “to block Israeli forces from entering the command centers and the underground assets belonging to Hamas.”
The Times verified that both videos were recorded at Shifa Hospital.
The Israeli military also released videos Sunday that it said showed two hostages, described as one Thai and one Nepali, being taken inside the hospital Oct. 7. Military officials said those videos — which appeared to have been taken by cameras mounted inside the hospital — were recorded hours after the Hamas assault.
The Times verified the location of those videos as Shifa, but not the identities of the men shown or the timestamps of the videos showing the hospital's interior.
Taken together, Israeli military officials said, the videos are strong evidence that Hamas used the hospital area as part of its military operations.
Israeli forces were continuing operations at Shifa, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a military spokesperson, said in a statement. Their top priority, he said, was uncovering information about the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Israel and Hamas have been trying to reach a deal to pause the fighting so that hostages can be released. But Jon Finer, President Joe Biden's deputy national security adviser, warned Sunday that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” and that the fragile negotiations could fall apart.