Hamas-run health ministry releases video inside Al-Shifa hospital as Israeli forces encircle northern Gaza

Tel Aviv — The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has released harrowing new footage of what it says are conditions inside Al-Shifa hospital. Israeli forces are continuing to pummel northern Gaza in what the IDF says is an effort to wipe out the Islamist militant group once and for all. 

In a seven-minute graphic video posted on the ministry’s Facebook page, an unnamed doctor is seen describing his surroundings as wounded and injured people are strewn across the hospital floor. 

“The department is completely full of wounded and injured,” the unnamed doctor says in the video. 

“They are on the ground taking their last breaths due to the collapse of the health system, due to the lack of medicines due to the occupation besieging the hospitals,” the man says as the camera focuses on seemingly lifeless bodies lying on the floor. 

Young children are also seen bandaged and on hospital gurneys. The narrator claims that a large number of the injured “are children.” 

“Serious cases are present here without treatment at all. There are no treatments. This is what the condition of people looks like. They are crying for their children. They are crying for their children without any treatment,” the man says.

Fierce fighting has raged in northern Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas militants’ bloody incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, which Israel says killed 1,200 people with about 240 hostages seized, in the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history. 

Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told CBS News Friday that the death toll from the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants has been revised to 1,200, down from the previously reported approximation of at least 1,400. Haitat said that the other 200 people killed were “probably terrorists.”   

Israel’s subsequent war on the Islamist militant group has left more than 11,000 people dead in the heavily bombarded Gaza Strip from Israeli strikes in the past month, the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said Friday, according to Reuters. 

Israel has agreed to daily humanitarian pauses in its offensive in northern Gaza, the White House and Israeli government announced on Thursday. 

“Israel is allowing safe passage through humanitarian corridors from the northern Gaza strip to the south,” the Israeli prime minister’s office told CBS News on Thursday. 

The Israeli army has repeatedly accused Hamas militants of using hospitals — particularly Al-Shifa — to coordinate their war effort and says underground tunnels are present underneath the hospital as hideouts for Hamas commanders. Israel had reported heavy fighting on Thursday near the hospital, saying it had killed dozens of militants and destroyed some tunnels. 

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that Israeli tanks had encircled two other children’s hospitals in northern Gaza and claimed to CBS News that a maternity hospital housing displaced people at Al-Shifa hospital complex had been directly targeted by Israeli forces. 

A World Health Organization spokesperson also said the hospital had been “coming under bombardment.”

“If there is a hell on earth today, its name is Northern Gaza. People who remain there, the corners of their existence is death, depravation, despair, displacement and literally darkness,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said Friday. 

“What do you tell your children in such a situation, it’s almost unimaginable. That the fireworks they see in the sky are out to kill them, ’cause that’s what it looks like,” she said. 

The IDF’s international spokesperson, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, denied those charges in a press briefing on Friday. 

“The IDF does not fire on hospitals … we are aware of the sensitivity of the hospitals and I am aware of the dynamic at the hospitals,” Hecht told reporters. “We are aware that Hamas are operating within the hospitals … We are not dropping bombs on Al-Shifa.”

“It would be easier for Hamas to leave the hospitals, and if they made it visual to us,” Hecht said.