PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: Israel’s military said 20 Palestinian fighters were killed Monday and scores arrested during a raid on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital that, it said, targeted “senior Hamas terrorists”.
Soldiers arrived in tanks and bombarded the area around the complex, which was filled with patients and refugees and was the largest medical center in Hamas-controlled territory.
“During the operation we arrested more than 200 suspected terrorists and they are currently in investigation,” Israel’s military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said in a televised statement.
“We eliminated more than 20 terrorists inside the hospital complex” and another 20 “in the area surrounding the hospital”, he added.
According to Hagari, Fayq al-Mabhouh, who was “head of special operations at the Hamas internal security organisation” was among the dead. A Gaza police also source confirmed to media his death, saying Mabhouh was a brigadier general in the force.
Speaking late in the night on Monday, the Israeli military spokesman said the soldiers were “continuing operations inside the hospital complex tonight”.
The latest military operation around the hospital has triggered alarm from the World Health Organization. The same facility was raided by Israeli troops before, in November, sparking an international outcry.
“We are terribly worried about the situation at Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO chief, wrote on X. “Hospitals should never be battlegrounds.”
Media, citing witnesses, confirmed air strikes on buildings in the area around the hospital and reported seeing hundreds of people, mostly women, children and the elderly, fleeing their homes.
Israel had been saying the complex housed an underground Hamas control base, a claim vehemently denied by the Hamas fighters.
According to the United Nations, most of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning.
According to his family, Fayq al-Mabhouh is the brother of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of the militant group Hamas.
Mahmoud was killed in Dubai in 2010, and UAE investigators suspected Israel’s Mossad spy agency behind it.
In January Israel’s army announced it had “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’s command structure in the northern Gaza Strip, also housing Al-Shifa.
