Israel says 20 dead, 200 detained at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza

The Israeli military said 20 Palestinian militants were killed and dozens detained in an operation on Monday Attack on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Targeting “senior Hamas terrorists.”

Soldiers swarmed in with tanks and airstrikes hit the area around the largest medical center in the Hamas-ruled region, which is packed with patients and displaced people.

“During the operation, we arrested more than 200 suspected terrorists, who are currently under investigation,” Israeli military spokesman Maj. Gen. Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement.

“We eliminated more than 20 terrorists inside the hospital building” and another 20 “in the area surrounding the hospital,” Hagari said.

Among the dead was Fayq al-Mabhouh, who Hagari described as “the head of special operations within Hamas’s internal security organization.” Gaza police sources confirmed his death, describing Mabhu as a brigadier general in the force.

Hagari said late Monday that Israeli soldiers “continue operations tonight inside the hospital.”

Recent military operations around the hospital – which was attacked by Israeli forces in November, sparking an international outcry – triggered an alert from the World Health Organization.

“We are very concerned about the situation at Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

“Hospitals should never become battlegrounds.”

An AFP reporter witnessed airstrikes on buildings in the area around the hospital and reported seeing “hundreds of people, mostly children, women and the elderly, fleeing their homes”.

Israel has repeatedly said the complex is an underground Hamas control base, but the militants deny this.

The hospital is unable to move

Hagari said it houses Hamas militants, including commanders, who “turned it into a command center where they can dispatch and manage terrorist operations and manage combat.”
Tedros said “minimum medical services have only recently been restored” in Shifa.

According to the United Nations, most hospitals in Gaza are no longer functioning.

Fayq al-Mabhouh is the brother of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of the armed wing of Hamas, according to family members.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in Dubai in 2010 and United Arab Emirates investigators suspected that the Israeli spy agency Mossad was responsible.

On Monday, the military released a video showing weapons and money allegedly seized from Al-Shifa that had been used by Hamas and another militant group, Islamic Jihad.

In January, the Israeli army said it had “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’s command structure in the northern Gaza Strip, where Shifa is based.

The military has carried out operations at other hospitals in Gaza since the war broke out on October 7 when Hamas militants attacked Israel from Gaza.

The unprecedented attack killed about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

Gaza militants also held about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza and 33 of them are presumed dead.

Israel has launched a relentless bombing and ground offensive that Gaza’s health ministry says has killed at least 31,726 people, mostly women and children.

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