“It’s a lie, there are no tunnels under the Al-Xifa hospital”. This is what an Arab citizen with Israeli nationality says, meters from the Damascus Gate, in East Jerusalem. After making a proclamation against Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the deaths of Palestinian civilians, he prefers not to give his name. “They would arrest me because I am Arab – he says – this is a dictatorship”. He does not defend the attack by Hamas, at all. “And what do you think?”, he asks the journalist.
From where we are, we can see the sentries from which young soldiers keep a watchful eye and with their rifles always at the ready, the gate of Damascus. Three boys dressed completely in black, in sportswear, are intercepted. They must show the documents. One is made to enter the guardhouse with his arms raised. Go out again with the same posture. Finally, they are allowed to enter the Old City.
The Israeli army insists that there are Hamas tunnels under the largest health complex in the strip. Until yesterday there was no sign of it, but last night a military statement assured that “Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure was exposed inside the hospital”. The note, accompanied by images, specified the discovery of “an operational tunnel and a vehicle containing a large quantity of weapons”.
Shortly before, the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, insisted that the operation was still “in progress”. Yesterday, Gallant visited the headquarters of Division 36, the unit that has taken control of Al-Xifa, in southern Israel. “There are important findings”, said the minister in a statement in which he remarked that the operation “is being carried out precisely”, in the face of the barrage of international criticism for the siege and subsequent military occupation of the hospital.
Gallant also reported that his forces already control “operationally the western sector of Gaza City” and that the offensive on the strip is now entering a new stage. “The next phase has begun: the forces are acting precisely and decisively”, indicated the minister.
At the same time, a military spokesman reported that troops found the body of one of the Hamas hostages in an “adjacent structure” to Al-Xifa hospital. This is Yehudit Weiss, a 65-year-old woman kidnapped on October 7 during the Islamist organization’s attack in southern Israel. The army claims that Weiss was “murdered by terrorists”.
The hospital is precisely in the western sector of the capital of the strip and yesterday the soldiers again searched the large health complex, as they had already done on Wednesday, when they announced the discovery in the magnetic resonance center of some weapons, uniforms and other belongings attributed to Hamas fighters. In addition to medical staff and patients, Al-Xifa shelters thousands of people who have lost their homes due to bombings that have already killed at least 11,500 Palestinians and left almost 30,000 injured and more than 3,000 missing.
The health authorities of Hamas report that Israel destroyed several rooms of the hospital and that, during the searches, they prohibited the entrances and exits of the center. In addition, a journalist from the AFP agency reported that Israeli soldiers fired at the buildings of the medical complex.
Earlier, Israeli forces confirmed that they already control the Gaza port, which they claimed was also used by Hamas. “Under the guise of a civilian port, Hamas used the area to train and carry out terrorist attacks, while using civilian and police ships from the Gaza port,” a statement said. Also yesterday, during the morning, the Israeli air force destroyed the house of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, a refugee in Qatar.
The occupation of Al-Xifa hospital and the deaths of civilians by Israeli bombs in Gaza continued to attract criticism from abroad yesterday. There is no longer a day in which the US Government, Israel’s main ally, does not issue a call for attention to the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu. “Israel needs to ensure the protection of civilians as it tries to extend military operations in Gaza,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a group of reporters yesterday, according to Reuters. On Wednesday, the US – along with the UK and Russia – abstained from a UN Security Council vote that led to the adoption of a statement calling on Israel to establish humanitarian pauses and corridors on the strip
However, the spokesman for the National Security Council of the United States, John Kirby, said again yesterday that the intelligence information available to the White House regarding the fact that Hamas had commando operations in the Al-Xifa hospital is “reliable”.
With the same ambiguity as the United States, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, lowered the tone of his criticism. If on Tuesday he had demanded “maximum restraint” from Israel, which earned him a harsh reply from Netanyahu, yesterday Trudeau emphasized “the importance of taking all possible measures to protect civilians and minimize casualties”, but making clear his support for the Government Israeli
On the other hand, the possibility remains latent that the conflict will spread to northern Israel or that it will end up breaking out in the West Bank. Ahirva launched eight attacks from Lebanon, while in an entry control to the Jerusalem area from the occupied territories three Palestinians were shot down after attacking Israeli soldiers, one of whom died.
And while Israel asserts that it already controls the western side of Gaza City, 3,500 kilometers away, at the Spanish airbase of Torrejón, near Madrid, some of its inhabitants say that “Gaza no longer exists”. In this way, they expressed to the journalists that many of the 139 Spanish-evacuees this week from the strip were waiting for them when they got off the plane that took them to Spain, a fact that saved them from the lottery of the death in which the gazians are installed.
