Reuters
[Source: Reuters]
The Israeli army showed a reinforced tunnel beside Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza on Wednesday, complete with a bathroom, kitchen and an air conditioned meeting room that it said had served as a command post for Hamas fighters.
The tunnel shaft, some two meters (6-1/2 feet) high, was accessed through an outdoor shaft in the hospital complex grounds, which were once crowded with tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians the army said had served as a human shield from war.
“That’s the way that they survive because they use the hospital as a human shield that protects them,” said Colonel Elad Tsuri, commander of an Israeli armoured brigade that found the tunnel. “And here they can stay for a long time. There is a room with air conditioning inside.”
Israel has long accused Hamas of using the Shifa hospital complex as a command and control center as part of a wider strategy that seeks to hide its forces among the civilian population.
Hamas and hospital officials have denied the accusation and the hospital site has been at the centre of accusations of war crimes on both sides, with Palestinians accusing Israel of targeting hospitals and Israel saying the sites were being used to shelter armed fighters.
Journalists were driven in Israeli military vehicles to the hospital complex in the northern Gaza Strip past a landscape of buildings destroyed or vacated during Israel’s nearly seven-week-old invasion of the Palestinian enclave.
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