Netanyahu says efforts to minimise civilian casualties unsuccessful, and blames Hamas

GAZA/JERUSALEM – Israeli soldiers said on Nov 17 they found a stone and concrete shaft used by Hamas at Gaza’s largest hospital, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said efforts to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties were “not successful” because Hamas stopped people from moving to safer places.

“Any civilian death is a tragedy, and we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way, while Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way,” Mr Netanyahu said in an interview on CBS News on Nov 16.

“So we send leaflets, call them on their cell phones, and we say, ‘Leave’, and many have left,” he said.

The Israeli army released a video on Nov 17 it said showed a tunnel entrance at an outdoor area inside the Al-Shifa Hospital complex.

The video showed a deep hole in the ground, littered with and surrounded by concrete and wood rubble and sand.

The army said its troops also found a vehicle in the hospital containing a large number of weapons.

Israel believes

a vast underground Hamas command headquarters was operating in tunnels

beneath the hospital.

Israel also said the body of an Israeli woman, one of around 240 hostages taken by Hamas gunmen when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct 7, was recovered inside a building near the hospital.

Military equipment, including Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, was also found in the building, it said.

Human Rights Watch cautioned that hospitals had special protections under international humanitarian law.

“Hospitals only lose those protections if it can be shown that harmful acts have been carried out from the premises,” the watchdog’s United Nations director Louis Charbonneau told Reuters.

The director of the Al-Shifa complex, Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya, said the hospital had been “under occupation authority for 48 hours and every minute that passes”, more patients will die.

“We are waiting for a slow death,” he told Al Jazeera TV.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Israeli soldiers had removed bodies from the hospital grounds and destroyed cars parked there, but they were not letting staff or patients leave.

Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said there was no water, food or baby milk in Al-Shifa, which was packed with 650 patients and about 7,000 people displaced by weeks of Israeli air strikes and artillery bombardments.

He demanded that the Israeli troops leave.

Medics have previously said dozens of patients, including three premature babies, had died from a lack of fuel and basic supplies during a days-long siege.

UNRWA operations ‘strangled’

Elsewhere, Israel ordered civilians to leave four towns in the southern part of the Gaza Strip on Nov 16, raising fears that the war could spread to areas where it had told people they would be safe.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement that Israeli forces had cleared the entire west part of Gaza City and that the “next stage has begun”.

The Israeli military’s chief of staff said Israel was close to destroying Hamas’ military system in the northern Gaza Strip.

“We will complete it,” said Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi.

Humanitarian agencies issued some of their most dire warnings about the harm that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was causing to civilians since it began retaliation against Hamas for its rampage in southern Israel.

The head of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, or UNRWA, said he believed there was a deliberate attempt to “strangle” its humanitarian work in Gaza, warning that the agency may have to entirely suspend its operations due to a lack of fuel.

UN aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Nov 17 due to shortages of fuel and a communications shutdown, deepening the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops continued to battle Hamas militants.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said civilians were facing the “immediate possibility of starvation”.

The UN said there would be no cross-border aid operation again on Nov 17. For a second consecutive day on Nov 16, no aid trucks arrived in Gaza due to a lack of fuel for distributing relief.

WFP executive director Cindy McCain said nearly the entire population was in desperate need of food assistance.

“Supplies of food and water are practically non-existent in Gaza and only a fraction of what is needed is arriving through the borders,” she said in a statement.

“With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” said Ms McCain.

Israel refuses fuel imports, saying these could be used by Hamas for military purposes.

“If the fuel does not come in, people will start to die because of the lack of fuel. Exactly as from when, I don’t know. But it will be sooner rather than later,” said UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini.

Gaza’s main telecommunications companies, Paltel and Jawwal, said all telecom services in Gaza had gone down, as all energy sources supplying the network had run out.

Hospitals closed

The World Health Organisation said it was trying to arrange a medical evacuation of patients from Al-Shifa, but was hindered by security concerns and the inability to communicate with anyone there.

All hospitals in northern Gaza have effectively been shut down by Israeli forces, which have ordered the evacuation of the entire northern part of the enclave, home to more than half its 2.3 million people.

At the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza, about 45 patients who needed urgent surgery had been left in the reception area, hospital chief Atef al-Kahlout told Al Jazeera.

Hamas fighters burst through the fence around Gaza on Oct 7,

in an assault that Israel says killed 1,200 people in the deadliest day in its history.

Israel has pounded Gaza with air strikes and cut off food and fuel. The Gaza health authorities deemed reliable by the UN say more than 11,000 people have been confirmed killed, more than 40 per cent of them children. REUTERS