Before the first siege and subsequent invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, in November 2023, the Israelis embarked on a large-scale propaganda campaign to try to convince the world that Hamas was using hospitals in Gaza as military bases. The evidence for this did not exist, however, and was reduced to the Israeli military saying “believe us”.
The Guardian reported that IDF's videos were edited, with suspiciously altered evidence. Tunnels shown were actually standard basements built during previous Israeli occupation in 2005.
The report was highly sceptical of the evidence provided by the IDF, and concluded it
“Fell well short of Al-Shifa hospital being a Hamas HQ” – The Guardian, Nov 2023
A detailed investigation and open-source analysis by the Washington Post found no solid link between Al-Shifa and Hamas military activity. CNN suggested Israel may have planted weapons for media tours.
“… the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials. That raises critical questions, legal and humanitarian experts say, about whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.” – Washington Post, Dec 2023
The arrest, detention and torture of the Director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, is further evidence that the Israeli military have been fabricating evidence of the hospital being used as a military base. Dr Abu Salmiya was detained on 23 November 2023 while he was in a WHO convoy escorting patients south to another hospital; the Israeli military said as hospital director he knew about and was therefore complicit in the use of the hospital as a military command centre. Dr Abu-Salmiya was released in early July 2024 after being held for over 7 months, during which time he says he was interrogated and “tortured almost daily”. Despite 3 court appearances during his detention, he was released without being charged with any crime . Dr Abu Salmiya also said that his torture “occurred after he refused to appear in a video and declare that his hospital had been a secret Hamas headquarters”, according to an article in the British Medical Journal.
Almayadeen English reported on 18 November 2023 that CNN said that Israel
“may have planted weapons at Al Shifa hospital”
before a tour of the hospital conducted for journalists.“Numerous discrepancies have surfaced surrounding an Israeli occupation forces (IOF) video released on November 15, showcasing a tour of alleged Palestinian Resistance weaponry reportedly found at Al-Shifa hospital, according to CNN.”
The IOF officer involved in the planting of weapons at Al Shifa is a retired Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the same IOF officer who advocated in January 2025, the withholding of all food and fuel from the Gaza strip, i.e. collective punishment of the entire population, a war crime, in order to defeat Hamas.IDF claimed hostages were kept in Rantisi Hospital. Their proof? A calendar misread as a list of Hamas guards. Social media called it out.
Using another hospital to try to make their case, on 13 November 2023 the IDF’s military spokesperson Daniel Hagari appeared in a video providing “evidence” of a military headquarters holding of Israeli hostages in the basement of the Rantisi children’s hospital in Gaza. In the video Hagari pointed to a notice on the wall which had “handwritten names of Hamas terrorists guarding Israeli hostages”. This was however a calendar with the days of the week written in Arabic. The claim became the source of much derision on social media.
Senior ICC prosecutor and the UN OHCHR report both agree: the claims were grossly exaggerated and legally unfounded.
In December 2024 a senior prosecutor at the ICC, Andrew Cayley, who is leading the ICC’s Palestine investigation, stated that reports of Hamas militant presence in hospitals had been “grossly exaggerated” and that
“clearly there are lies that are being spoken” on the issue, and “we need to be able to demonstrate very clearly what the level of military presence was, if at all, in these hospitals because I think we’ve been misled about that in the press.”
In Indonesian Hospital, the IDF destroyed all medical equipment after evacuating the staff and patients. A deliberate act to disable healthcare access.
“Every medical machine seemed to have been deliberately destroyed…” – MSF, Feb 2025
The true motive for the IOF’s attacks on hospitals is made clear by the actions of Israeli soldiers in the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza in December 2024. After driving out all the patients and staff, the Israeli military destroyed all the medical machines and devices in the hospital. The purpose was clear: to ensure it could not function again, depriving the local population of health services.
Medicins Sans Frontieres’ emergency co-ordinator Caroline Seguin stated on 13 February 2025 that:
“The level of destruction is total—it’s a flat land. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Our Palestinian colleagues are no longer able to recognize their own neighbourhoods. Some were in shock; others literally collapsed ….. There is no health system anymore in the northern part of the strip. Kamal Adwan Hospital has been razed, while Al-Shifa, Al-Awda, and Indonesian hospitals are seriously damaged and only partially functioning…..We were utterly shocked to observe that in Indonesian Hospital, every medical machine seemed to have been deliberately destroyed; they were smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore….These machines are made to save people’s lives—mothers, fathers, children. It’s devastating to see the state of these hospitals.” – MSF, Feb 2025
Depriving the population of Gaza of essential health care services is a central component of the genocide in Gaza.
Ironically, evidence shows the Israeli military used Gaza’s Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and schools as military bases. They even used an ambulance to launch a raid in the West Bank.
Having provided no proof of Hamas using hospitals as military bases, it turns out that it is the Israeli military which has been using hospitals, ambulances and schools as military bases in its war on Gaza. The Washington Post published satellite imagery of this at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital south of Gaza City. The hospital, which was Gaza’s only cancer hospital, was forced to close in early November 2023 after military attacks and being denied any further fuel. The images also showed the nearby school in Juhor ad Dik was being used by Israeli soldiers in March 2024.
In January 2024 Israeli special forces soldiers dressed as doctors raided Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians while they were asleep. They made their way to a room on the third floor and shot all three men in the head using pistols fitted with silencers.
In December 2024 the IOF used an ambulance to transport its troops and conduct a raid into Balata refugee camp in Nablus , in a
“flagrant violation of international humanitarian law”.
Two Palestinians, including an 80-year-old woman, were killed and three others were wounded. The IOF admitted they had done this after video evidence circulated online, and said they were “investigating the incident”.Under the Geneva Conventions, hospitals are protected unless used for harm—and even then, civilian protections remain unless proportionality is met. Experts argue Israel failed at every legal threshold.
“Israel has failed to provide anywhere even close to the level of evidence required to justify the narrow exception under which hospitals can be targeted under the laws of war ….. In the rare case that protection is lifted, Israel would have to provide civilians with a meaningful chance to evacuate and even still, any civilians who remain in the hospital following an evacuation order would still be protected by the rules of proportionality….. At every stage of this legal assessment, Israel has fallen abysmally short” – Mai El-Sadany, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington
Legally in times of war hospitals have protected status under the Geneva Conventions, and attacking “hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected” is a war crime under article 8 of the Rome statute (which established the International Criminal Court). If a civilian hospital is used for acts “harmful to the enemy”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. However, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not. And if a hospital is being used in such a way, those attacking the hospital must act proportionately and not simply, for example fire on civilians, patients and healthcare staff inside the hospital.
This has not stopped the IDF from making more of these unsubstantiated claims, usually around the time they are conducting military attacks on major hospitals. According to Jewish News the IDF said on 15 February 2024 that “over 85% of major medical facilities in Gaza have been used by Hamas for terror operations, according to “intelligence assessments and information gathered on the ground”. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari also said the IDF has “credible intelligence” that Hamas held hostages in the hospitals. At this time the IDF was laying siege to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, using “loitering” drones to shoot people entering and leaving the hospital, which it later shelled, cut off the electricity and drove out patients and staff, and then arrested the Director of the Hospital, Dr Atef Al-Hout. Once more the only “evidence” provided is the word of the IDF.
The pattern suggests not isolated incidents, but a strategy: to systematically dismantle Gaza’s health system—part of a broader campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable.
“One of the worst massacres in Palestinian history” – Doaa Shaheen , a journalist from Gaza, in reference to the events at Shifa.
This (failed) propaganda effort by the Israeli military has been crucial to its efforts to justify attacking and destroying Gaza’s hospitals. As time has gone by the true intention of the Israelis has become clear: to completely destroy the health infrastructure (alongside schools, universities, mosques, churches, water and sewerage infrastructure and everything else) in the Gaza strip, in order to make it uninhabitable for Palestinians, and achieve its goal of ethnically cleansing the territory.
We saw the catastrophic end point of this propaganda exercise against Al-Shifa Hospital in early April 2024, after a further siege and occupation of the hospital by the Israeli military lasting two weeks. They totally destroyed the hospital and killed hundreds of patients, healthcare staff and people taking refuge in the hospital, burying them in mass graves.
It is important to note that attacks on Palestinian healthcare facilities are not new, they have been a constant feature of the Israeli occupation. For example, in 2022, the WHO documented 187 attacks on healthcare facilities in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). In its report “Right to Health, Barriers to Health and Attacks on Health Care in the OPT, 2019 to 2021” the WHO reported that “between 2019 and 2021, there were 563 attacks on health care in the oPt”.