As the Israeli military takeover of the al-Shifa Hospital enters its second week, those who have been released, as well as the 45 homes surrounding the hospital who were forced to evacuate, have provided harrowing testimony of Israeli forces killing, beating, humiliating, stripping, torturing and mass executing Palestinian patients, medical staff and civilians sheltered at the hospital.
This is the second time during the 171-day long Israeli invasion of Gaza that troops have forced their way into the al-Shifa Hospital and attacked patients, doctors and civilians who had sheltered at the hospital. The first time they invaded the hospital, the Israeli military made many false claims, such as a preposterous claim that the hospital was being used as a ‘headquarters’ for Hamas armed resistance fighters. The army published photos of ‘tunnels’ under the hospital which became a source of ridicule, since they were clearly old storage areas that were no longer in use. In fact, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak pointed out in an interview at the time, the Israeli military had, during his tenure thirty years ago, installed tunnels under al-Shifa themselves. But those tunnels had not been used in decades.
This time, the Israeli military published a photo collage of alleged Hamas fighters they had “found” at the hospital. But an analysis of the photo collage found that 54 of the 150 photos it contained were actually duplicates, and the remainder were photos of fighters that had already been killed, were already in Israeli custody, or were outside of Gaza.
A report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released on 23 March has documented the Israeli army’s deliberate use of Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its forces and military operations inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex.
This comes several days after the Israeli army began its assault on the medical complex on 18 March, resulting in hundreds of deaths, injuries, and arrests.
TESTIMONIES:
○ A Palestinian, K.F, said Israeli forces attached cameras to him and three other young men, giving them remote orders to inspect rooms inside Al-Shifa. He was made to do this for several hours before being forced to evacuate the complex with his family.
○ An elderly man in his sixties, M.N., said that his son was forced to enter sewage areas underneath the hospital, and witnessed others being made to stand in front of Israeli forces and vehicles at the entrances of the complex to fortify and prevent their targeting.
○ The wife of a nurse at the hospital witnessed her husband being used as a human shield to open doors to sections in Al-Shifa Medical Complex for several hours, before he was told to evacuate the hospital towards the city of Deir al-Balah. Her husband’s fate remains unknown.
○ Several families near the complex reported that Israeli forces used detained young men to enter homes and force Palestinians to evacuate to central and southern Gaza. A woman from the “Arafat” family reported that the Israeli military sent a detainee in his late thirties, stripped of his clothes except for his underwear, to inform them to evacuate their home within 30 minutes, threatening to bomb it over their heads. Following their evacuation, they witnessed several others in similar conditions.
IsraeliPalestineNews.org published the following report about the current siege of al-Shifa hospital, which has now been expanded to two other hospitals:
With Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City already under a brutal siege for nearly a week, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported on Sunday that Israeli forces stormed the Nasser Medical Complex and Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
“Israeli occupation vehicles are besieging both Al-Amal Hospital and Al-Naser Hospital amidst very intense shelling and heavy gunfire,” the society said in a statement.
“All of our teams are in extreme danger at the moment and are completely immobilized,” it also said.
New York Times adds: The raid on Al-Shifa has also focused international attention on the dire situation faced by hospitals and the patients sheltering there, according to local authorities. Many of the 30,000 Palestinians who the Gaza Health Ministry said had been sheltering at Al-Shifa were displaced once again by the raid.
The Gazan authorities said that at least 13 patients had died as a result of the raid because they were deprived of medicine and treatment, or when their ventilators stopped working after the Israelis cut the electricity. Those claims could not be verified.
The Gaza Health Ministry said on Saturday that patients still in Al-Shifa were in critical condition, with maggots beginning to infect wounds.
The Israeli military troops killed five medical staff inside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to Gaza’s government media office. They are still trapping hundreds of patients and displaced people inside this medical facility.
Earlier Sunday, Israeli military vehicles suddenly entered near the Nasser Medical Complex, coinciding with a series of Israeli raids in various areas of the city causing deaths and injuries, according to eyewitnesses.
The PRCS added that Israeli troops closed the gates of the hospital with barriers, and everyone in the hospital was told to leave naked.
Al Jazeera spoke to PRCS spokesperson Nebal Farsakh to discuss the situation in Gaza.
“They raped women, kidnapped women, executed women, and pulled dead bodies from under the rubble to unleash their dogs on them,” she said. “Is there anything worse than this? Is there anything more horrifying than hearing women call for help, and when we try to reach them to provide assistance, they shoot at us?”
Watch the interview below:
French President Emmanuel Macron warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that forcible population transfer is a war crime that violates international law, condemning “Israeli announcements on settlements” in talks with the Israeli leader.
UNRWA BANNED FROM NORTHERN GAZA – Al Jazeera reports: The head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) says Israel informed the UN that it will no longer approve any aid convoys run by the agency.
The announcement comes just days after Israel had opened an additional crossing in northern Gaza.
“This is outrageous [and] makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man made famine. These restrictions must be lifted”, Philippe Lazzarini wrote in an X post.
He warned that the move will speed up the coming of famine in the north of the Gaza Strip, and said that “many more will die of hunger, dehydration”.
Famine is likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, the world’s hunger watchdog, known as the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said last week.
The IPC said 70 percent of people in parts of northern Gaza were suffering the most severe level of food shortage, more than triple the 20 percent threshold to be considered famine. In all, 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, about half the population, were experiencing “catastrophic” shortages of food.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST PALESTINIAN WOMEN UNDERREPORTED – Al Jazeera reports: As accounts of sexual violence against Palestinian women in Gaza are coming out, two women special rapporteurs of the UN say the issue is underreported and undervalued.
Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a post on X that it is “abhorrent” that reports of rape by Israeli forces keep coming out without any consequences.
“Rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide! It must stop!”
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, said, “I lost count of how many renowned journalists interviewed me on the alleged mistreatment of/sexual abuse against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, and never published any article on this”.
Also read: Report: Israeli forces strip, rape pregnant Gazan woman in public
UNRWA LEADER RESPONDS TO BAN – Al Jazeera reports: Martin Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, says he repeatedly urged Israel to lift all its restrictions on aid to Gaza, but it has now done the exact opposite.
“UNRWA is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza,” he said about the UN organisation for Palestinian refugees, which has now been told by Israel that its food convoys to northern Gaza will be blocked entirely despite the humanitarian disaster there.
“The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.”
Palestine Chronicle adds: The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs saw the decision as “a direct threat to a prestigious and credible UN institution that serves the issues of Palestinian refugees and is concerned with their rights, not only in the occupied Palestinian territory, but also for Palestinian refugees in the region, especially their right to return.”
