Israel on Sunday stepped up its accusations against the Hamas movement of committing violations at Al-Shifa hospital, saying it witnessed the execution of a captured female soldier and the holding of two foreigners hostage.
Al-Shifa is the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and one of the centers of the devastating attack launched by Israel six weeks ago, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians took refuge at the same time.
The hospital is currently evacuating patients and staff since Israeli forces stormed it last week on the grounds that it contains a Hamas centre.
Israel is also looking for around 240 people kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza after the October 7 cross-border attack that sparked the war.
One of them was Noah Marciano, 19, an Israeli army conscript, whose body was recovered near Al-Shifa hospital last week. Hamas said she was killed in an Israeli airstrike and broadcast a video showing her body with no marks except a head wound.
The Israeli army said a forensic examination showed that the woman had suffered non-life-threatening injuries following such an attack.
Army spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “According to information confirmed by intelligence, Hamas terrorists took Noah inside the walls of Al-Shifa hospital, where they killed her.”
He didn’t go into details.
Hagari said in his televised news conference that Hamas militants also brought a Nepalese and a Thai among the foreign workers detained in the Oct. 7 attack on Al-Shifa hospital. The names of the two hostages were not given.
In the video captured by surveillance cameras and broadcast by Hagari, it appears that a group of men are taking a person to the hospital, which surprised the medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a stretcher. There was another man wearing civilian clothes and carrying a rifle nearby.
Hamas has not yet commented on Hagari’s statements. The Palestinian Islamic Movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, said earlier that it had transferred some of the hostages to hospitals for treatment.
In a separate context, the Israeli army on Sunday released a video of what it described as a 55-meter-long, ten-meter-deep tunnel dug by Palestinian militants under the Shifa compound.
While Hamas admits to having a hundreds of kilometer-long network of secret tunnels, bunkers and openings throughout the Palestinian Strip, it denies that these tunnels are located in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
The video shows a narrow corridor with an arched concrete ceiling ending in a gray door, which the army said in a statement is blast-resistant.
The statement doesn’t address what’s behind the door. The statement said the tunnel was accessed through an opening discovered in a small building containing ammunition within the Al-Shifa compound. Another video clip showed an external opening in the complex.
Munir Al-Bursh, director of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, denied the Israeli statement about the tunnel, describing it as a “complete lie”.
He told satellite channel Al Jazeera: “I’ve been in hospital for eight days… and they haven’t found anything.”