JERUSALEM: Israel’s military released security camera footage Sunday it said showed hostages being brought into Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on October 7 after being kidnapped during Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel.
Al-Shifa hospital has become a focal point for Israel’s subsequent military operations in the Gaza Strip, with the army repeatedly saying Hamas uses it as a base, a claim the military has been under pressure to back up.
The militants and medical staff have denied that a command center is under the hospital.
The first clip, which appears to be time-stamped 10:53 am on October 7, shows a man in shorts and a pale blue shirt being dragged through what looks like an entrance hall by five men, at least three of whom are armed.
In the second, seemingly time-stamped 10:55 am, an injured man in underwear is wheeled in on a gurney by seven men, at least four of them armed, as several men in blue hospital scrubs look on.
AFP was not immediately able to verify the footage.
“Here you can see Hamas taking a hostage inside... they’re taking him inside the hospital,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said, describing the two men as hostages from Nepal and Thailand.
“We have not yet located both of these hostages,” he added. “We do not know where they are.”
The CCTV footage appears to have been shot on the morning that Hamas gunmen began storming southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping some 240 others, according to Israeli authorities.
Since then, Israel has pounded Gaza relentlessly from the air, land and sea with officials in the Hamas-run territory saying 13,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians.
“These findings prove that the Hamas terrorist organization used the Shifa hospital complex on the day of the massacre as terrorist infrastructure,” the military and intelligence services said in a statement.
Hamas dismissed the footage. It had repeatedly said it had taken several captives to hospital for treatment, “particularly because some had been wounded in airstrikes” by Israel, senior political bureau member Izzat Al-Rishq said in a statement.
“We have released images of all that and the army spokesman is acting as if he has discovered something incredible,” he added.
Earlier Sunday the Israeli army said “troops exposed a 55-meter-long terror tunnel 10 meters deep underneath the Shifa hospital complex,” which ran under the hospital and ended at a blast door.
Hagari also gave more details about the death of 19-year-old soldier Noa Marciano, who was taken hostage. The army announced on Friday that troops had recovered her remains in the area of Al-Shifa.
Hamas said she was killed by an Israeli air strike, a claim denied by Israel which said the militants murdered her.
Hagari said Marciano was being held by the militants very close to Al-Shifa hospital.
“During ongoing combat in the vicinity of where she was held captive, Noa’s Hamas captor was killed and Noa was injured,” he said, stressing that her injuries “were not life-threatening.”
Citing “concrete intelligence,” he said “Hamas terrorists took Noa into Shifa hospital where she was murdered,” he said, with her body later dumped outside the hospital on an orange stretcher where troops found it.
Israeli army releases footage it says shows hostages at Gaza hospital
https://arab.news/n3qjm
Israeli army releases footage it says shows hostages at Gaza hospital
- Al-Shifa hospital has become a focal point for Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
