IDF: Hamas shooting from inside al-Wafa hospital

The IDF reports that Hamas has been using the al-Wafa Hospital in eastern Gaza City to fire on IDF troops within the last hour.

Hamas has used positions in the Al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza to fire automatic weapons and anti-tank missiles on soldiers, and the IDF fired back in recent minutes, the army said Wednesday.

"The hospital was used for activating war rooms and command and control centers by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad," the army said.

The IDF Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has issued repeated and direct warnings to the hospital's manager, and to other Palestinians involved in running the hospital, the army said.

"Firing on our soldiers has grown in recent hours and endangered forces. As a result, the IDF has decided to strike terrorists operating in the hospital complex," it added.

Earlier, the IDF announced the results of an investigation into firing that destroyed part of the hospital last week. 

But a deeper initial investigation by the IDF, reported here by the Post for the first time indicates that there was no firing directly on the hospital, but only on a group of military targets, including combatants firing rockets on Israel in real-time.

Also, the military official said that an initial deeper review of the incident indicates that the hospital was not told to evacuate, as has been reported.

Rather, said the official, the warning was that rockets were being shot directly from the hospital area, that Israel intended to hit those firing the rockets and that at the very least, if the hospital could not be evacuated, patients should move away from the windows.

In this narrative, the damage to the hospital was the unintentional indirect result of attacking the nearby rocket launchers.

IDF Maj. Gen Noam Tibon will be investigating all such incidents even more fully and may even eventually report other conclusions, but this is by far the most in-depth and specific version of events that the IDF has given on this incident to date.

The damage to the hospital and the idea that the IDF was warning all of its patients to evacuate was seen as particularly controversial because the B'Tselem human rights group has said that the hospital has 17 patients, between the ages of 14 and 95, all suffering from different degrees of paralysis.

B'Tselem had also added that "there is no other rehabilitative institute in the area where patients can be transferred. These patients require special conditions that cannot be recreated," implying that a transfer not to a special rehabilitative hospital could be life-threatening.

The military official's version that there were rocket launchers in the hospital's vicinity receives some support from UNRWA's recent confirmation that terror groups had secretly hidden rockets in one of their Gaza facilities, breaking rules of neutrality.

Several attempts to receive an updated response from Hospital Director Basman al-‘Ashi before press time were unsuccessful.

Funny - I haven't heard of them using Shifa Hospital that way. Maybe because they don't want to endanger the Hamas leadership. But they couldn't give a damn about endangering sick and wounded civilians. Typical terrorists.