Since thousands of Hamas thugs swept out of Gaza Oct. 7 — carrying out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust — one pointed question is, where is Hamas based?
The answer? Their command posts, bases and arms depots are in wards, basements and tunnels underneath hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian structures. This was true before Oct. 7 and remains so today.
“About 100 of us took control of Rantisi Hospital in Gaza,” a captured Hamas operative named Abdelrahaman Alaa Ibrahim Samur said in one of a number of filmed interviews made by the Israel Defense Forces and released Nov. 20. They “operated from the hospital,” he said, “because it was a secure place.”
Another captured Hamas fighter said he was based inside Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza. “They dressed as nursing staff but they were not nurses or doctors,” he said. “Hamas operatives dressed as medical staff in order to blend in within the hospital wards.”
In another video, Hamuda Riad Asad Shamalah, whose family sought shelter in a hospital, describes how Hamas used them as human shields. “It’s obvious that the IDF would not strike a place with 40,000 people in it,” he said.
“The doctors were furious because Hamas operatives and operatives of other terrorist organizations were inside the hospital,” another captured Hamas fighter said.
“No one can tell them no. Who could do so?” Shamalah added. “If you would dare to confront a Hamas member, he may kill you.”
While Hamas places its operations under or next to civilian sites, Israeli forces take steps to get civilians away from places they target. When they opened safe passageways for people to get out of Gaza City, Hamas tried to stop people from leaving, including firing on them. The IDF has literally made millions of phone calls to civilians to inform them of coming bombing and urge them to evacuate.
Once having left Gaza, numerous foreign reporters have confirmed what Israel has said all along — that Hamas fires rockets out of densely populated areas, often from in or around U.N. facilities, and that it uses Al-Shifa Hospital as its command center.
A 2015 report by Amnesty International — no friend of Israel — said civilians were “interrogated and tortured or otherwise ill-treated in a disused outpatient’s clinic within the grounds of Gaza City’s main al-Shifa Hospital.” At least three people Hamas accused of “collaboration” died there.
The New York Times reported in gory detail in 2014 how Hamas murdered six suspected collaborators in a 24-hour span. A local Palestinian reporter, Radjaa Abu Dagga, reported how he was interrogated at Al-Shifa by armed Hamas men and told not to try to leave Gaza.
“I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot,” a British doctor who used to work at Al-Shifa told France24 Nov. 19. He declined to give his name to protect colleagues still there. He said they “were 10% frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes” and “90% frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.”
Much of the liberal press and all of the middle-class left attribute their figures for deaths in Gaza on “Gaza health authorities,” as if this was an independent, unbiased source. But these “authorities” are just Hamas. What they report is Hamas propaganda.
Liberal press buys Hamas lies
Drawing on these sources, headlines around the world Oct. 18 reported an Israeli strike had hit the Al-Ahli Hospital, killing 500 people. But this was Hamas propaganda. Israel denied responsibility and conducted an investigation, concluding it was a misfired Islamic Jihad missile that hit a parking lot, not the hospital. And with a much lower casualty figure.
Initially the New York Times, like other liberal press, tended toward Hamas’ report, but days later printed a small “correction” that Israel’s version was true.
Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati had been reporting from Gaza, but when he left, he came forward to expose more about the Hamas lie. He cited eyewitnesses who had seen that Hamas “militants rushed and cleared debris” from the errant rocket blast to get rid of the evidence.
The casualty figures for Gazans released by Hamas authorities can’t be independently verified. Nor does Hamas distinguish between its combatants, who wear civilian clothes, not uniforms, and noncombatants.
From the New York Times to CNN, the Washington Post and BBC, liberal media have slanted their news coverage to feed calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, a move that would give time to Hamas to regroup. They’ve cast doubt on Israeli evidence that an underground command post for Hamas exists below Al-Shifa Hospital.
The Israeli army released film Nov. 16 of a reinforced tunnel shaft in the complex beside a vehicle filled with deadly weaponry. A 32-foot reinforced shaft leads to an underground arched concrete passage 180 foot long ending with a blast-proof door and a gun hole.
Qatari-based Al Jazeera, which falsely accuses Israeli forces of purposely shelling hospitals, tried to suggest this might be a hospital bomb shelter! But by Hamas’ own admission, no such shelters have ever been built for civilians in Gaza.
Three days later, Israeli authorities released CCTV footage from Al-Shifa showing Hamas members taking two bloodied hostages into the complex, having bypassed several other Gazan hospitals on the way from the Israel border, after the Oct. 7 pogrom. The captives were immigrant workers, one Nepalese and the other Thai. Behind one of them a terrorist wields a meat cleaver; others are armed with knives and guns.
Hamas has more than 300 miles of tunnels, some of them 20 to 30 stories below ground, known as the “Gaza metro.” For years it has stockpiled fuel, food and medicine as well as ammunition and weapons, enough for months of war. Hamas has no intention of “ceasing fire.”
Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, told RT-TV Oct. 30, “We built tunnels … to protect us,” not the people of Gaza. “75% in Gaza are refugees,” he said. “It is the responsibility of the U.N. to protect them.”
Contrary to media claims of an Israeli “siege” of Al-Shifa Hospital, it was the IDF, not Hamas, that made sure food and medical supplies reached the hospital in the midst of the fighting. The evacuation of medical staff and patients, including babies, was at the request of the hospital director, not by Israeli orders. Newborn and premature babies were safely transported out. Hamas resisted such transfers, preferring to keep patients — including babies — as shields, and to feed the liberal media frenzy.