Israel 'captures 100 Hamas fighters' in hospital raid

Israeli soldiers captured around 100 suspected Hamas militants during a raid in Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the IDF claimed today, as it released first-person footage of its troops storming the facility. 

The intense clip showed soldiers from Shayetet 13 - an elite Israeli reconnaissance unit - approaching the building alongside tanks and armoured vehicles before stalking through the hospital corridors in search of Hamas fighters.

The clip did not show the soldiers detaining militants or medical staff but concluded with the unit inspecting what looked like a weapons cache uncovered in a hospital room. 

Gaza health officials and Hamas denied that militants were present at the hospital, protesting that Israeli troops detained dozens of vital male medical staffers with the facility already struggling to operate.

But the IDF said it was necessary to do so because Hamas had disguised some people identified as militants as hospital staff. 

'The soldiers apprehended approximately 100 terrorists from the compound, including terrorists who attempted to escape during the evacuation of civilians,' the IDF said.

'Inside the hospital, they found weapons, terror funds, and intelligence documents.

'A few of the fully identified terrorists disguised themselves as medical staff so we didn't have any alternative but to check the medical staff as well,' an IDF official said in a briefing this morning. 

Footage circulated by Gaza's health ministry on Saturday - which Reuters could not immediately verify - showed damage to several buildings after the Israeli forces withdrew.

The military official said that troops had caused limited damage to the hospital when entering it and that soldiers also had to destroy what he described as 'dual use' equipment, like oxygen tanks, which if detonated could have harmed anyone at the complex.

Medical staffers refused to evacuate the hospital or leave their patients unattended. 

Hundreds of displaced Palestinians had also been sheltering there.

'They evacuated all those who were sheltering here... They separated men from women and made two queues, it was very humiliating for our men since they took them without clothes and nothing to cover with,' said Mayssoun Alian, a hospital nurse.

The military official said that suspected Hamas men arrested were stripped to check them for weapons.

'After checking them we supplied them with clothes,' he said.

Gaza medics said at least two children had died inside the intensive care unit after Israeli fire hit the generators and oxygen station in the facility on Friday.

The IDF contested the claims and said civilians at the hospital were kept safe, despite heavy fighting near the complex. 

Fuel, medical equipment and blood units had been provided to the hospital and electricity and oxygen supply had been ensured, it said.

Following the storming of the Kamal Adwan hospital, Israeli tanks thrust deeper on Monday into two north Gaza towns and a historic refugee camp this morning.

Some 100,000 civilians are now trapped there, the Palestinian emergency service said, in what the military said were operations to root out regrouping Hamas militants.

The Gaza Strip's health ministry said at least 19 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and bombardment today, 13 of them in the north of the shattered coastal territory.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said around 100,000 people were marooned in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies - though the number could not be independently verified.

The emergency service said its operations had ground to a halt because of the three-week-long Israeli assault back into the north, an area where the military said it had wiped out viable Hamas combat forces earlier in the year-long war.

As talks led by the US, Egypt and Qatar to broker a ceasefire resumed on Sunday after multiple abortive attempts, Egypt's president proposed an initial two-day truce to exchange four Israeli hostages of Hamas for some Palestinian prisoners, to be followed by talks within 10 days on a permanent ceasefire.

There was no public comment from Israel or Hamas, each of whom accuse the other of maintaining irreconcilable conditions for ending the war.

North Gaza was the first part of the enclave to be hammered by Israel's ground offensive into the territory after Hamas' cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, with intensive bombing largely flattening towns like Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya.

Nevertheless, Hamas-led militants continue to attack Israeli forces in hit-and-run operations with anti-tank rockets, mortar salvoes and bombs planted in buildings, streets and other areas where they anticipate Israeli forces taking up positions.

The war erupted after Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, by Israeli tallies.

The death toll from Israel's retaliatory air and ground onslaught in Gaza has reached 43,020, the Gaza health ministry said in an update on Monday, with the densely populated enclave widely reduced to rubble.