If you’ve been following the news out of Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli counteroffensive, you probably recall all of the hullabaloo surrounding the al-Shifa hospital complex in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, through its Gaza Health Ministry, accused Israel of all manner of atrocities related to the hospital, from claiming that it had been blown up (it hadn’t) to the deaths of babies and healthcare workers. For their part, Israel pointed out that Hamas had been using the hospital complex as an underground headquarters linked to its network of terror tunnels. Most of the legacy media ate up Hamas’ claims with a spoon, repeating them on an hourly basis until Israel finally started delivering proof, compromising some of their own intelligence resources in the process. Now America’s intelligence agencies have completed an investigation and released an intelligence assessment of the situation. They are “confident” that Hamas used the hospital to house their command infrastructure. They even held hostages there. So will this put the pro-Hamas propaganda to rest? Probably not, but it is what it is. (Associated Press)
The U.S. is “confident” that Palestinian militant groups used Gaza’s largest hospital to hold “at least a few” hostages seized during their bloody Oct. 7 attack and to house command infrastructure, an American intelligence assessment declassified Tuesday and shared by a U.S. official found.
The assessment offers the firmest U.S. support for Israeli claims about the Shifa hospital complex, which was raided by Israeli forces in November in an operation decried by global humanitarian organizations and some members of President Joe Biden’ s party. Yet the information released doesn’t fully back some of Israel’s most significant allegations that the hospital served as the central node for activities by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The U.S. official shared the assessment on the 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.
You’ll notice that the AP quickly seized on the phrase in the assessment saying that Hamas had held “at least a few hostages” at the hospital. They’re still trying to undermine Israel’s intelligence reports and make Hamas seem less culpable, despite the mountains of evidence that eventually turned up. In reality, neither Israel nor the United States knows exactly how many of the hostages were in there originally. By the time the IDF got down into the tunnels, Hamas had been given plenty of time to move most of them elsewhere.
We should also stop to consider the fact that not just hostages, but guns, ammunition, and uniforms were found in the lower levels and the tunnels. Keep in mind that we’re talking about tunnels here. How many hospitals in other countries do you know of that are connected to a series of secret tunnels connecting them to other parts of the city? (Unless they have their own subway stop, of course.) We also have the video testimony of a “doctor” from another hospital who turned out to be a Hamas commander and said that their ambulance had been used to move hostages and even the bodies of dead hostages. How much more evidence do you need?
Even before Israel entered al-Shifa, our own national security people were saying that we already had intelligence showing that the hospitals were a key element of Hamas’ military operations. This came from John Kirby at that time:
“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters a day before Israel entered the hospital.
This has been known for some time. Hamas built a massive network of terror tunnels under Gaza to help them attack and evade Israeli forces and civilians. Israeli intelligence worked for years to map most of them out and the hospitals were nexus points for that network. Now that the rats are being flushed out of the tunnels, the proof continues to build. And yet, the final sentence of the AP report reads, “The Israeli military has yet to unveil any infrastructure nearly as sprawling and developed as the purported center.” That’s because they don’t show all of their cards while the fighting is still going on. Hamas is on the run, but it’s not dead yet. But the American press largely still wants to paint Israel, the victims of the October 7 terror attacks, as the bad guys in all of this. It’s disgusting.