Hamas health official says IDF still operating inside Shifa Hospital

IDF soldiers operate at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City overnight in a handout photo distributed on November 15, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)
IDF soldiers operate at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City overnight in a handout photo distributed on November 15, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

A senior official with the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza says Israeli forces are still operating inside Shifa Hospital.

Speaking by phone from the hospital, Munir al-Boursh says Israeli soldiers ransacked the basement and other buildings, including those housing the emergency and surgery departments.

“They are still here… Patients, women and children are terrified,” he says.

Al-Boursh says an Israeli official spoke with him by phone early this morning and asked him to join the forces searching the facility, but he refused.

Israel has said that Hamas’s largest command center is located underneath the hospital, and the IDF has vowed to provide medical assistance to patients in the hospital and safe passage to civilians as it seeks Hamas operatives hiding out.

A senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said soldiers had found “concrete evidence” of Hamas’s use of the hospital as a military facility.

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