WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is “convinced” that Palestinian militant teams used Gaza’s largest hospital to hold “at least some” hostages captured in their bloody Oct. 7, 2023, attack and to send space command infrastructure, according to a declassified U. S. report. Intelligence assessment. On Tuesday and shared through a U. S. official found.
The assessment gives the most powerful U. S. position on Israeli claims related to the Shifa hospital complex, which was stormed by Israeli forces in November in an operation denounced by global aid organizations and some members of President Joe Biden’s party. Still, the published reports do not fully reflect some of Israel’s most prominent claims that the hospital served as a central node for the activities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The U. S. official shared the assessment on condition of anonymity.
“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”
The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.
In the past, U. S. officials had cited classified information, received independently of the Israelis, as an offer for the Israeli incursion.
“I can confirm to you that we have data that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are employing certain hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and the tunnels underneath to hide and their military operations and hold hostages,” Homeland Security said. council spokesman John Kirby told reporters a day before Israel was admitted to the hospital.
Gaza’s hospitals have played a central role in the contradictory narratives surrounding the war, which the Hamas-led Health Ministry says has killed another 22,100 people, but without differentiating between civilians and fighters. Hospitals enjoy a prestige of special coverage under foreign war laws. They can lose this prestige if they are used for military purposes.
Before the raid on the hospital, the Israeli military unveiled a detailed 3D model of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital showing a series of underground installations that it said was part of an elaborate Hamas command-and-control center under the territory’s largest health care facility. The Israeli military has yet to unveil any infrastructure nearly as sprawling and developed as the purported center.