Israeli troops withdraw from Shifa Hospital after 2-week raid

Footage showed widespread devastation, with the facility's main buildings reduced to burned-out husks

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Deir Al-Balah, 1 April

 

The Israeli military withdrew from Gaza's largest hospital early Monday after a two-week raid that engulfed the facility and surrounding districts in fighting. Footage showed widespread devastation, with the facility's main buildings reduced to burned-out husks.

 

The military has described the raid on Shifa Hospital as a major battlefield victory in the nearly six-month war and said its troops killed 200 militants in the operation, though the claim they were all militants could not be confirmed. But the raid came at a time of mounting frustration in Israel, with tens of thousands protesting Sunday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demanding that he do more to bring home dozens of hostages held in Gaza. It was the largest anti-government demonstration since the start of the war.

 

In other developments, a second shipment of food aid arrived by sea Monday in the latest test of a new maritime route from the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus. One of the three boats could be seen off the coast, and Cyprus' foreign minister said they had received permission to unload. The precise mechanism of delivery was not yet clear.

 

The fighting around Shifa showed that Hamas can still put up resistance even in one of the hardest-hit areas. Israel said it had largely dismantled Hamas in northern Gaza and withdrew thousands of troops late last year. The raid also gutted a hospital that had once been the heart of Gaza's health system but which doctors and staff had struggled to get even partially operating again after a previous Israeli assault in November.

 

Israel said it launched the latest raid on Shifa because senior Hamas operatives had regrouped there and were planning attacks. It identified six officials from Hamas' military wing it said were killed inside the hospital during the raid. It also said it seized weapons and valuable intelligence.

 

The military said it killed 200 militants inside and outside Shifa, though it provided no evidence all were militants. The raid triggered days of heavy fighting for blocks around Shifa, with witnesses reporting airstrikes, the shelling of homes and troops going house to house to force residents to leave.

 

After the troops withdrew, hundreds of Palestinians returned to search for lost loved ones or examine the damage. Among the dead were Ahmed Maqadma and his mother — both doctors at Shifa — and his cousin, said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian-British doctor who volunteered at Shifa and other hospitals during the first months of the war before returning to Britain.

 

The fate of the three had been unknown since they talked by phone with family as they tried to leave Shifa nearly a week ago and the line suddenly went dead. On Monday, relatives found their bodies with gunshot wounds about a block from the hospital, said Abu Sitta, who is in touch with the family.

 

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