Israeli raid on Shifa hospital fuels anger, divisions overseas; Israel says Hamas utilizing website as protect
Israel‘s raid on the Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip is fueling an international backlash over the Jewish state’s marketing campaign in opposition to Hamas, and the dueling narratives concerning the operation underscore how divisive Israel‘s military operation has become.
Israeli special forces late Tuesday entered the Gaza facility, the largest hospital in the Palestinian enclave, saying Hamas militants are using the site as a command center and a weapons depot.
The raid was met with sharp condemnation abroad, including at the United Nations, where top officials implored Jerusalem that “hospitals are not battlegrounds” and that the young, sick and elderly inside the hospital must be kept safe.
But Israel maintains it had little choice but to mount an operation. The militant group Hamas, which on Oct. 7 launched a terror attack on Israel that killed 1,400 Israelis and resulted in more than 240 people taken hostage, is intentionally using the hospital as a shield, Israeli officials said. Israel also argued that Hamas intentionally used the ground beneath sensitive sites such as hospitals to construct key parts of its elaborate Gaza tunnel network.
“While we and most countries do everything we can to protect the sick, sadly that’s not the case in Gaza. Hamas sees unwell Gazans as a chance — a chance to place probably the most weak within the line of fireside,” Israeli Defense Forces Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler stated in a social media put up explaining why the IDF launched the raid.
“We know Hamas has done this for years,” Col. Shefler stated. “Hamas terrorists have embedded themselves deliberately in any place they could, be it schools, kindergartens, and hospitals. Hamas, in the most cynical way, is not only using the fuel, the electricity, the oxygen, the medicine from hospitals, but is using the most vulnerable, the sick and the ill, as human shields. This is what we are up against.”
At the hospital, Munir al-Boursh, a senior official with Gaza’s Health Ministry, informed The Associated Press that Israeli forces had ransacked the basement and different buildings at Shifa, together with these housing the emergency and surgical procedure departments.
The Health Ministry stated 40 sufferers, together with three infants, have died since Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of gas Saturday. Another 36 infants are prone to dying as a result of there isn’t any energy for incubators, the AP reported.
Gaza’s Health Ministry is run by Hamas, and its figures haven’t been independently verified. Many of its assertions are unable to be absolutely corroborated by exterior teams, given the extreme combating in Gaza.
Israel stated that whereas conducting the raid, its troops delivered incubators, child meals, medication and different badly wanted provides to the ability.
But that has performed little to quell the rising anger overseas.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Israel‘s marketing campaign in opposition to Hamas, ramped up his rhetoric Wednesday.
“Israel is implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people,” Mr. Erdogan stated, in response to English-language media translations of his remarks. “I say openly that Israel is a terrorist state.”
At the U.N., officers pleaded with Israel to alter course.
“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” U.N. reduction coordinator Martin Griffiths stated Wednesday, whereas additionally stressing that Hamas should not use “a place like a hospital as a shield for their presence.”
