In this video published on X today by Palestine Deep Dive, a Palestinian woman named Mariam Mohamed al Khateeb, a twenty-year-old dental student who has an ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get her family out of the Gaza Strip, describes how Israeli soldiers burned her grandmother to death this past March:
Her grandmother’s home was near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which came under attack by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in mid-November last year and again in March of this year. Israeli soldiers ordered other family members to flee the area at gunpoint and to leave the grandmother behind. She was burned alive in her home in a fire that, according to Al Khateeb, was started by Israeli forces.
Back in November, Israel tried to justify its assault on the Al Shifa Hospital despite its protected status under international humanitarian law by claiming that Hamas had built its military headquarters beneath the hospital complex. The IDF released a computer-generated propaganda video graphically showing what Israel claimed to exist under the hospital: an elaborate multi-story network of tunnels and bunker rooms.
Israel had long claimed that Hamas was using a bunker underneath the hospital for its military command center, such as during its “Operation Cast Lead”, which started on December 27, 2008 and ended on January 18, 2009. Israel never produced any evidence to support that claim.
The US government defended Israel’s assault on the hospital in November 2023 on the grounds that it had independently gathered intelligence to support its claim that Hamas was using the grounds for its base, but it presented no evidence to support the claim.
It was true that the hospital had an underground concrete basement, which Israel knew about because it was built by Israel in the late 1980s according the a hospital renovation and expansion plan by Israeli architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. A Newsweek “fact check” article published n November 15, 2023, verified that “a bunker or basement was built at Israel’s discretion in the 1980s.”
On November 20, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and when asked about what evidence Israel had that Hamas had a major command center under Al Shifa Hospital, he repeated the claim that Hamas was using “bunkers” that he admitted were “originally built by Israeli constructors”. When Amanpour surprisedly asked whether he had just misspoken, Barak affirmed, “No, no. You know, decades ago, we were running the place. So, we held them. It’s a decade, many decades ago, probably five — four decades ago, that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound.”
During its assault, Israel cut the power to the hospital complex, thus shutting down incubators and killing six newborn babies on life support. By November 14, 180 patients had died as a result of Israel’s assault, forcing hospital staff had to start digging mass graves to bury the bodies.
As Human Rights Watch noted, “Despite the Israeli military’s claims on November 5, 2023, of ‘Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,’ no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”
After taking control of Al Shifa Hospital, the IDF released video of what it claimed were weapons and a tunnel entrance found at the site, but as the New York Times reported on November 16, the images “could not be independently verified, and still have not proven the existence of the sprawling Hamas operation that it said the hospital concealed.” A separate Times article the same day noted that the IDF “has yet to present public documentation of a vast network of tunnels”, a claim that had been “central to its defense of its military campaign in Gaza.”
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan accused Israel of planting the weapons there, and the Times noted it was “unclear from the video what purpose the passageway served or how far it extended. Israeli forces appear to have destroyed a small structure and dug an extensive area of ground to uncover it, an analysis of satellite imagery and video showed.”
Two Times reporters and a photographer were subsequently allowed to visit, under IDF escort, “a stone-and-concrete shaft on the grounds of Al-Shifa with a staircase descending into the earth”, which, the Times sympathetically reported, “did not seem to settle the question” of whether Hamas had its command center there, a claim that “the Israeli military has yet to show incontrovertible proof of”.
A BBC analysis of the IDF’s video purporting to show Hamas weapons inside the hospital noted that “Israel has yet to produce evidence of the tunnels” that it claimed existed and served as an elaborate command headquarters. BBC reporters were also allowed to visit the site, and they observed two guns behind an MRI machine where the IDF video had shown just one — an indication that the IDF itself had planted the weapons there.
As the New York Times noted sympathetically again on November 17, “the Israeli military has struggled to produce proof to back its assertion that Hamas was using the hospital and its patients as human shields.”
Israel’s failure to produce evidence of the elaborate bunker complex it claimed existed underneath Al Shifa Hospital was punctuated by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proclaiming on November 17 that “the war must go on” until Hamas was eliminated, which would require the IDF to push farther south because, by Olmert’s account, “Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza Strip, is the real headquarters of Hamas.”
On November 19, the IDF released video footage from a camera being lowered into the uncovered shaft along with footage evidently taken by a solider who’d been lowered down and followed a tunnel shaft to a metal door, but as Jeremy Scahill observed in The Intercept, this footage failed to prove that Hamas had a military command headquarters beneath the hospital.
A Washington Post analysis likewise noted that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center”. Key conclusions the Post analysis arrived at were that there was no evidence of military use of the tunnel network by Hamas, and none of the hospital’s buildings appeared to be connected to it, contrary to the IDF’s claim that it could be accessed from inside the hospital wards.
The New York Times in February 2024 published an interactive feature based on an analysis of “[c]lassified Israeli intelligence documents” that it has obtained, which the Times claimed “suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.” The Times conceded, however, that the IDF “has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center under the facility.”
Having claimed the Hamas headquarters was a vast multi-story network of bunkers and tunnels, Israel had “publicly revealed the existence of only one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital,” at a shack outside its main buildings. In the end, the Times further noted, there “may no longer be a way to directly assess” Israel’s claim of “a labyrinth of tunnels and underground compounds used by Hamas’s leaders to direct terrorist activities” because before leaving the hospital grounds on November 24, the IDF “lined the tunnel with explosives and destroyed it”.
In March 2024, the IDF again assaulted Al Shifa Hospital, displacing civilians sheltering there along with patients, killing nearly 200 people the IDF called “terrorists”, and turning the complex into “a wasteland”, in the words Taysir al-Tanna, a vascular surgeon at the hospital.
“Most of the buildings are extensively damaged or destroyed, and the majority of equipment is unusable or reduced to ashes,” said the World Health Organization (WHO), leaving the hospital “an empty shell” and completely non-functional.
In April, mass graves were containing hundreds of bodies were discovered at Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and at Al Shifa Hospital. As Amnesty International described the mass graves as “potential crime scenes” and called for an investigation. The New York Times noted that Palestinians had dug some mass graves earlier, but one of the bodies seen uncovered in a video report by Palestinian photojournalist Haseeb Alwazeer was “wearing blue medical scrubs”, and the person’s hands appeared to be bound together.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the bodies of 30 Palestinians were found in two graves in the Al Shifa Hospital courtyard, with reports “that the hands of some of these bodies were also tied” and the possibility of many additional victims. At Al Nasser Hospital, 283 bodies were exhumed from mass graves. “Among the deceased,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani reported, “were allegedly older people, women, and wounded, while others were found … with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes.”
After Israel’s second raid on Al Shifa Hospital, “the hospital premises were littered with bodies and shallow graves,” as the New York Times put it in an article describing the “near collapse” of Gaza’s health care system, with the WHO documenting over 800 attacks on health care in what it called Israel’s “systematic dismantling of healthcare”.
All carried out, of course, with the full support and backing of the US government, notwithstanding meaningless rhetorical expressions of concern for the fate of Palestinian civilians.
