In Gaza, Israeli troops conducted building-by-building searches at Al-Shifa Hospital on November 17, raising concerns for trapped Palestinian civilians. Conditions worsened as a communications blackout heightened fears, with over 1.5 million internally displaced and an immediate risk of starvation.
Israeli troops carried out building-by-building searches at Gaza’s main hospital, as a new communications blackout in the territory on Friday compounded fears for Palestinian civilians trapped inside the facility.
Al-Shifa Hospital has become a focal point for Israeli operations in northern Gaza since soldiers raided the complex on Wednesday, hunting for a command center where they say that the militant group Hamas operates. Hamas and hospital managers deny that charge, and there has been international concern about several thousand people, including wounded patients and premature babies who are believed to be trapped inside.
Israel’s air bombardment and ground operation has killed 11,500 people, including thousands of children, according to local authorities in Gaza.
Israeli authorities have defended their operation, and the military said on Thursday that it found rifles, ammunition, explosives and the entrance to a tunnel shaft at Al-Shifa. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleged that hostages may even have been held at the medical facility. “We had strong indications that they were held in the Shifa Hospital, which is one of the reasons we entered the hospital,” he told CBS Evening News. “If they were (there), they were taken out,” he said.
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Allegations about the hospital have not been verified, and on Friday, communications with the Gaza Strip were severed once again.
Network provider Paltel group said that all telecommunications were down because “all energy sources sustaining the network have been depleted, and fuel was not allowed in.”
The UN warned that the blackout would compound the misery of civilians, complicating efforts to distribute aid and possibly triggering looting of its supplies. “When you have a blackout, and you cannot communicate with anyone anymore… that triggers and fuels, even more, the anxiety and the panic,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
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‘Immediate Possibility of Starvation’
On the ground, UN agencies have warned that conditions are rapidly deteriorating for Palestinian civilians. More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced, and Israel’s blockade of the territory means “civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” World Food Programe executive director Cindy McCain said. Food and water have become “practically non-existent,” the agency added.
Israel said that its forces were searching Al-Shifa “one building at a time,” and the army announced on Friday that troops had recovered the remains of kidnapped woman soldier Noa Marciano, 19, “from a structure adjacent to Al-Shifa hospital.”
The army had confirmed earlier in the week the death of Marciano, without giving the cause. Hamas said that she had been killed in an Israeli bombardment.
On Thursday, the army said that soldiers near Al-Shifa had found the body of another hostage. Yehudit Weiss, 65, was kidnapped from her home in the border kibbutz community of Beeri, one of the areas worst-hit by the brutal Hamas assault.
Negotiations are ongoing for the release of the hostages, some of them just infants, in exchange for a pause in fighting.
Qatar, where Hamas has political offices, and Egypt have been mediating what Egypt’s foreign minister described on Thursday as “very delicate” discussions.
‘Settler Violence’
Alongside the war in Gaza, there is growing concern about violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians has surged.
In an attack claimed by Hamas, three gunmen on Thursday killed an Israeli soldier and wounded five others at a checkpoint leading into Jerusalem from the West Bank.
Overnight, a large deployment of Israeli troops raided the Jenin refugee camp, AFP reporters said, prompting clashes. Israel’s military did not immediately comment.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel on Thursday to take “urgent” action to “de-escalate tensions in the West Bank, including by confronting rising levels of settler extremist violence,” the State Department said.
Elsewhere, Israeli warplanes hit targets near the Syrian capital again, Syria’s state news agency reported. The strikes caused damage, but there were no reports of casualties.
Miroslava Salazar, with AFP
