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
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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