IDF: 90 Hamas gunmen killed, over 300 nabbed in raid at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital

The Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday continued an operation against Hamas forces at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, with the military saying troops had killed more than 90 gunmen so far.

The operation, which began early Monday morning, was being carried out by the Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit, the 401st Armored Brigade, and other forces.

Troops raided the hospital, the largest medical center in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli intelligence indicated that Hamas operatives, including commanders, had returned to the complex to use it as a command center for planning attacks against Israel and troops in Gaza. It was previously raided by the military in November.

“Over the past day, the troops have eliminated terrorists and located weapons in the hospital area, while preventing harm to civilians, patients, medical teams and medical equipment,” the IDF said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The IDF said that hundreds of terror suspects had so far been questioned at the hospital complex by field interrogators of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 and the Shin Bet security agency.

In a video statement from the hospital on Wednesday, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said troops had detained between 250 and 300 terror operatives at the medical center during the ongoing operation.

He said another 300 suspects were also being questioned.

“We are talking about many [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] operatives, including battalion commanders, Hamas operatives, including political officials,” Hagari said.

“We will reach all the terrorists in this area. Our goal is to arrest the senior officials alive and bring them in for interrogation. Whoever fights against us will be killed,” he continued.

Photos circulating on social media on Wednesday showed IDF troops detaining suspected Hamas operatives at the hospital overnight.

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— איתי בלומנטל ???????? Itay Blumental (@ItayBlumental) March 20, 2024

Among those detained at Shifa and brought to Israel for further questioning was Mahmoud Qawasmeh, a senior Hamas operative involved in the planning of the 2014 kidnapping and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, the Shin Bet announced.

In a statement, the security agency said Qawasmeh was “one of the planners and financiers of the infrastructure that carried out the kidnapping and murder attack” in 2014.

The Shin Bet said he had been exiled to the Gaza Strip as part of the 2011 Shalit deal, where he continued to advance attacks in the West Bank, including shooting attacks in recent years carried out by Hamas cells.

Hagari, in his statement, said the IDF was also providing food and water to the civilians sheltering at the hospital and brought in generators for Shifa’s ER.

He said the operation at Shifa would likely last several more days.

The IDF also released a video showing weapons recovered by troops at Shifa, and clips of the elite Duvdevan commando unit operating on the hospital’s premises.

Two Israeli soldiers have been killed in the operation at Shifa, and a senior Hamas commander was slain in an exchange of fire with troops seeking to detain him.

Israeli troops first entered the hospital early in the conflict, on November 5. The war was triggered on October 7 when some 3,000 terrorists stormed the border with Israel and unleashed an unprecedented attack on the country’s southern communities, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 253 hostages to Gaza, where more than half remain.

The IDF also said Wednesday it had struck a Hamas tunnel shaft in northern Gaza overnight. The site was identified after a rocket was fired toward the southern city of Sderot on Tuesday. It fell short and landed inside Gaza.

Also in northern Gaza, the IDF said it struck a six-man Hamas cell in the Jabaliya area.

In central Gaza, the Nahal Brigade continued to battle Hamas operatives over the past day, and in southern Gaza, the 98th Division was battling the terror group in the Khan Younis suburb of al-Qarara, the IDF said.

Also Wednesday, the IDF and Shin Bet announced that an airstrike in southern Gaza’s Rafah earlier in the week had killed senior officers in Hamas’s so-called Emergency Committee.

In the strike carried out by fighter jets on Monday, Sayyid Qutb Hashash, Osama Hamad Dhahir, and Hadi Abu al-Rous were killed, and Muhammad Awad al-Malalhi was apparently wounded, according to the IDF.

Hashash, Dhahir, and al-Malalhi were the heads of Hamas’s Emergency Committee in the north and east Rafah areas, and al-Rous was the operations officer of the Emergency Committee, the IDF said.

The committee is a Hamas body tasked with maintaining public order and civil control in the Strip’s municipalities.

The IDF said the officials were “responsible for organizing terror activity and communication with Hamas operatives on the ground” as well as aiding “the military wing of the terror organization to establish continued control.

“The senior officers were the emissaries of Hamas leadership in Rafah, concentrated Hamas’s activity in humanitarian zones and were responsible for coordination with Hamas operatives in the field,” it said.

The strike came after the IDF targeted Nidal al-Eid, the head of the Emergency Committee in Rafah last week, the military added.

More than a million Palestinians displaced by the five-month-old war between Israel and Hamas have been sheltering in Rafah, which abuts Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Israel says one-sixth of Hamas’s combat strength — four battalions of rifle- and rocket-wielding fighters — is in Rafah and must be crushed before the war can conclude. But the prospect of a spiraling civilian toll has raised alarm abroad.

With a new round of mediated talks underway in Qatar on a possible release of hostages, the White House said it would confer with Jerusalem before any troops or tanks move into Rafah.

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said on Wednesday 104 Palestinians had been killed in fighting in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, bringing its official death toll since October 7 to 31,923.

These figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 13,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Agencies contributed to this report.