A doctor at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital has said that the facility’s director and several other medical personnel were arrested by Israeli forces on Thursday. “Doctor Mohammad Abu Salmiya was arrested along with several other senior doctors,” Khalid Abu Samra, a chief of department at the hospital, told AFP.
Israel has long accused Hamas of using the Shifa hospital complex as a command and control center as part of a wider strategy that seeks to hide its forces among the civilian population. Hamas and hospital officials have denied the accusation, with Palestinians accusing Israel of targeting hospitals.
This comes a day after journalists were driven in Israeli military vehicles to the hospital complex in the northern Gaza Strip past a landscape of buildings destroyed or vacated during Israel’s nearly seven-week-old war.