Excerpt below from:
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/21/al-shifa-hospital-hamas-israel/
Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda
As Israel wages its propaganda war over Al-Shifa, it is simultaneously laying siege to yet another medical facility.
Jeremy Scahill
November 21 2023, 7:22 a.m.
As the death toll in Gaza surpasses 13,000 Palestinians, including more than 5,500 children, the Israel Defense Forces propaganda machine has sought to use Al-Shifa Hospital as its main exhibit in justifying the unjustifiable. It is clear that the Israeli strategy centers on a belief that if the IDF can convince the world that Hamas used the hospital as a base of military operations, all of the carpet bombing — the attacks on refugee camps, schools, and hospitals — will retroactively be viewed as just acts of war against a terrorist enemy.
Both Israel and the White House, including President Joe Biden personally, have staked their credibility on the claim that there is a massive smoking gun lying below Al-Shifa Hospital. The U.S. said publicly it was not relying exclusively on Israel to back up its own assertions. Leaving aside the fact that both the U.S. and Israel have track records as long as the Gaza Strip of lying about the alleged crimes of their adversaries, the key question is not whether a tunnel or rooms exist under Al-Shifa, but whether they were being used for a clear military or combat purpose by Hamas, as the U.S. and Israel have alleged.
Since the October 7 raids led by Hamas in Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 845 Israeli civilians, along with some 350 soldiers and police, and saw more than 240 people taken as hostages, the IDF has placed an intense focus on Hamas’s underground infrastructure. Israel’s allegation that Hamas’s main headquarters was housed in or under the sprawling Al-Shifa Hospital compound is not new. But the zealous focus on it is an indication that Israel wants to make it the central issue in its case to push back against critics of its indiscriminate campaign of civilian death and destruction in Gaza. Israel has sought to make Al-Shifa a Rorschach test in its narrative war, and Israel has accused journalists, the United Nations, doctors, and nurses of being part of the conspiracy to hide Hamas’s use of the hospital as a military command center from the world.
To date, this propaganda campaign has not gone well.
After initially claiming that Al-Shifa Hospital was effectively Hamas’s Pentagon — a narrative
publicly bolstered by the Biden administration — the IDF released its
first round of purported evidence, which more or less consisted of a smattering of automatic rifles, some nestled behind an MRI machine, and a conveniently placed combat vest with a Hamas logo on it.
With the exception of Israel’s most die-hard supporters, this effort appeared to convince almost no one of the sweeping assertions about Al-Shifa’s importance to Hamas’s current operations. After all, the IDF had already shown the public a slick 3D video model purporting to be a depiction of an advanced underground command and control lair used by Hamas. So Israel’s first effort at selling the case fell flat.
Aric Toler
@AricToler
The IDF posted a few videos of their tour through the hospital. No tunnels, command centers, etc. to be found in any of these clips or pictures. Instead, focus is on "grab bags" of some guns and body armor scattered around, and a laptop next to CD-Rs.
Several other efforts to produce videos of what Israel claimed to be evidence of a significant Hamas base at hospitals have been met with widespread
derision and skepticism, including from Western
media outlets that historically report Israeli military assertions about its operations against Palestinians as fact. The IDF videos have been mocked across social media and compared to Geraldo Rivera’s much-hyped — and utterly disastrous — live 1986
nationally televised special promising to reveal the secrets hidden in Al Capone’s underground vault.
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Al-Shifa’s Tunnels Were Built by Israel
It’s also well known that there are, in fact, tunnels and rooms under Al-Shifa. We know that because Israel admits that it built them in the early 1980s. According to Israeli media reports, the underground facilities were designed by Tel Aviv architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. “Israel renovated and expanded the hospital complex with American assistance, in a project that also included the excavation of an underground concrete floor,”
according to Zvi Elhyani, founder of the Israel Architecture Archive,
writing in Israel’s Ynetnews.
The underground infrastructure was part of a modernization and expansion effort at Al-Shifa commissioned by Israel’s Public Works Department. “The Israeli civil administration in the territories constructed the hospital complex’s Building Number 2, which has a large cement basement that housed the hospital’s laundry and various administrative services,” according to a
report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The room and tunnels under Al-Shifa were reportedly completed in 1983. Tablet magazine
described the space as “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network.” Zippor’s son Barak, who began working at his father’s architecture firm in the 1990s,
said that during the construction at Al-Shifa in the 1980s, the Israeli construction contractors hired Hamas to provide security guards to prevent attacks on the building site.
“You know, decades ago we were running the place, so we helped them — it was decades, many decades ago, probably four decades ago that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
told a visibly stunned CNN host Christiane Amanpour.