By Francesca Hangeior
Israeli forces have launched an operation early Monday in and around Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, with witnesses reporting air strikes and tanks near the complex crowded with patients and displaced people.
The pre-dawn raid came at a time of growing concern over a looming Israeli ground invasion of Gaza’s crowded far-southern city of Rafah. This is just as international mediators and envoys readied to meet in Qatar Monday 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 “is expected to take place today”. A source said this on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the talks.
The Israeli military told Gazans to immediately evacuate from Al-Shifa in Gaza City after it launched the raid.
The riad is based on what the army termed intelligence “indicating the use of the hospital by senior Hamas terrorists”.
Witnesses told 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!”
The health ministry of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said residents near the hospital in the largely devastated city had reported dozens of casualties who could not be helped. This was “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”. Note that thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering.
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”.
Arabic speakers were deployed to “facilitate dialogue with the patients remaining in the hospital”.