The spokesman for the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, Ashraf Al-Qudra, said, “The Israeli army storms the hospital and destroys the departments. It destroyed the radiology department and blew up the burns and kidney department.”
Al-Qudra pointed out that the Israeli forces are “investigating the doctors, the injured, and the displaced.”
While the Israeli army announced that it had found video clips related to the hostages on computers in Al-Shifa Hospital, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday that the pictures published by Israel of weapons that it says its soldiers found inside the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip are not enough to justify canceling the status of weapons. The hospital is protected under the laws of war.
Reuters quoted Louis Charbonneau, Director of the United Nations Department in the organization, as saying: “Hospitals enjoy special protection under international humanitarian law. Doctors, nurses, ambulances and other hospital workers must be allowed to do their work and patients must be protected.”
He added: “Hospitals do not lose this protection unless it can be proven that harmful acts were committed from within their buildings. The Israeli government has not provided any evidence of this.”
The Israeli army announced earlier Thursday that video clips related to the hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on southern Israel on October 7 were found on computers in Al-Shifa Hospital.
An army official said in a statement that the footage was found on equipment “belonging to Hamas,” noting that his forces are “searching” the Al-Shifa Hospital complex “which consists of several buildings (…) in a precise operation.”
According to the official, the Israeli army is searching “every floor, while hundreds of patients and medical staff remain in the complex.”
Since the start of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, Israel has repeatedly repeated that Hamas uses Al-Shifa Hospital as a headquarters for commanding military operations and storing weapons.
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