Gaza’s ‘Largest Hospital’ Exposed as a Hamas Hideout

O n Monday, the Israeli military raided Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which has been in the news off and on since October. Fighting continued on Tuesday. The Israel Defense Forces have found and captured approximately 300 terrorists hiding in the hospital complex and have killed dozens of gunmen. Among them was Faiq Mabhouh, the head of Hamas’s internal-security operations, who was hiding in a room next to a weapons cache.

“Faiq Mabhouh was eliminated in an encounter with the troops while armed and hiding in a compound at the Shifa hospital, from which he operated and advanced terrorist activity,” the IDF said in a statement.

Five months into Israel’s defensive war against Hamas, less than half of Gaza’s hospitals are still functioning, according to the United Nations, and health services in the Strip are rapidly depleting. Humanitarian groups have stressed that Gaza needs medical supplies desperately, and now. Hamas has seen an opportunity in the dire state of Gaza’s health-care system — an opportunity to hide among injured civilians and stash weapons in hospital infrastructure, to shelter itself from Israeli forces, knowing that Israel can’t, and won’t, countenance the leveling of hospitals. Can’t, because Israel would lose international support. Won’t, because Israel is a nation that values life. That Hamas uses civilian centers in such a way should shock the world into decrying the terrorist group’s inhumane ends and supporting Israel’s just war. Instead, the international media, the U.N., and a variety of humanitarian bodies have used Israel’s raids on hospitals as evidence to suggest that Israel commits war crimes. Thus they reward Hamas’s effort to maximize civilian suffering so that Israel’s war effort will be impeded by international concern over the humanitarian crisis.

Hamas has denied for months that it uses hospitals as bases, even though terrorists keep popping up at medical complexes. The Israeli military has come under harsh scrutiny for saying otherwise, despite uncovering a network of tunnels underneath Al-Shifa in November. Western media have used previous IDF raids of Al-Shifa to suggest that Israel targets civilian centers; in December, the Washington Post published a long investigation into “the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital,” in which it cast doubt on Israel’s “remarkably specific” claims of terrorist activity within the hospital compound. The “assault,” Post journalists concluded, was “not just a watershed moment in the conflict, but a vital case study in Israel’s adherence to the laws of war.”

Al-Shifa has been referred to in countless news reports as “the largest hospital in Gaza”; the incompleteness of that description portrays it solely as a place of service to the community. What Al-Shifa actually is, and what the IDF has said it is for months, is a hideout for terrorists who are more than willing to use civilians — whether young, old, male, or female, some innocent and some complicit — as human shields. Even if the media doubt that the Hamas higher-up whom Israel took out on Monday was indeed a member of Hamas, the IDF still reported finding dozens more Hamas terrorists in the hospital. Why were terrorists there if not to shelter among the innocent?

And why are the media using the IDF’s raid of Al-Shifa to show the supposed extreme nature of Israel’s campaign in Gaza instead of to show a prime example of Hamas’s cruelty? While the media accuse Israel of not doing enough to reduce civilian casualties, they ignore Hamas’s reason for being in a hospital in the first place: to increase civilian casualties. Israel fights against an enemy that deliberately makes it as difficult as possible to preserve civilian life. Nevertheless, in Gaza, Israel reports one of the most impressive combatant-to-civilian death ratios (1:1.5) in urban warfare.

To imagine pregnant women being transferred to and from hospitals because maternity wards can’t be sustained, or neonatal intensive care units that don’t have the electricity to keep premature babies alive, or emergency rooms overrun with malnourished civilians, triggers an understandable reaction to the war in Gaza. But no matter how news reports frame such stories, the fact is that Israel does not target hospitals or other places holding civilians. What Israel targets is the terrorists who hide among civilians.

In response to Israel’s Monday raid, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said, “Hospitals should never be battlegrounds. We are terribly worried about the situation at Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, which is endangering health workers, patients and civilians. . . . Any hostilities or militarization of the facility jeopardize health services, access for ambulances, and delivery of life-saving supplies. Hospitals must be protected. Ceasefire!” He failed to mention that Hamas makes hospitals into battlegrounds. Israel now has the tireless, thankless job of protecting its own country and innocent Palestinians from Hamas terrorists, who use civilians as shields and hospitals as control posts.

Twenty-year-old IDF sergeant Matan Vinogradov was killed in combat during Monday’s raid when Hamas terrorists reportedly shot at him from inside the hospital. Matan graduated from Shuvu Jerusalem High School, and his former principal, Rabbi Reuven Kaplan, said he was “an amazing boy and a wonderful student, who was close to the Torah and mitzvot.” He is Israel’s 250th soldier to fall in Gaza. As a result of ongoing fighting at Al-Shifa, an Israeli reservist, Sebastian Haion, 51, became the 251st.

Hamas continues to exact a tragic cost from the people of Gaza, who deserve to live free of a government by terrorists who cower behind them.