Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza’s Shifa hospital

Palestinians fleeing the fighting in war-torn Gaza walk on Salaheddine road in the Zeitoun district of the southern part of the Gaza Strip on November 19, 2023, as battles between Israel and the Hamas movement continue. (AFP)
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Updated 20 November 2023
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Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza’s Shifa hospital

  • The Israeli military said a forensic examination found she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such a strike

JERUSALEM: Israel stepped up accusations of Hamas abuses at the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital on Sunday, saying a captive soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages held at a site that has been a focus of its devastating six-week-old offensive.
At one point a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa Hospital has been evacuating patients and staff since Israeli troops swept in last week on what they called a mission to root out hidden Hamas facilities.
Israel is also searching for some 240 people Hamas kidnapped to Gaza after an Oct. 7 cross-border assault that sparked the war.
One of these was a 19-year-old Israeli army conscript, Noa Marciano, whose body was recovered near Shifa last week. Hamas said she died in an Israeli air strike and issued a video that appeared to show her corpse, unmarked except for a head wound.
The Israeli military said a forensic examination found she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such a strike.
“According to intelligence information — solid intelligence information — Noa was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa hospital. There, she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist,” chief spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said.
He did not elaborate.
In his televised briefing, Hagari said Hamas gunmen had also brought a Nepalese and a Thai, among foreign workers seized in the Oct. 7 raid, to Shifa. He did not name the two hostages.
CCTV video aired by Hagari appeared to show a group of men frog-marching an individual into a hospital, to the surprise of medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a gurney. Another man nearby, in civilian clothes, had an assault rifle.
Hamas did not immediately comment on Hagari’s statements. The Palestinian Islamist group, which runs Gaza, has previously said it took some hostages to hospitals for treatment.
Separately on Sunday, the Israeli military published video of what it described as a tunnel, running 55 meters in length and dug by Palestinians 10 meters under the Shifa compound.
While acknowledging that it has a network of hundreds of kilometers of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts throughout the Palestinian enclave, Hamas has denied that these are located in civilian infrastructure like hospitals.
The video showed a narrow passage with arched concrete roofing, ending at what the military, in a statement, described as a blast-proof door.
The statement did not say what might be beyond the door. The tunnel had been accessed through a shaft discovered in a shed within the Shifa compound that contained munitions, it said. A second video showed an outdoor shaft-opening in the compound.
Mounir El Barsh, the Gaza health ministry director, dismissed the Israeli statement on the tunnel as a “pure lie.”
“They have been at the hospital for eight days ... and yet they haven’t found anything,” he told Al Jazeera television.

 


UN records 613 killings in Gaza near humanitarian convoys or aid distribution points run by US group

Updated 04 July 2025
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UN records 613 killings in Gaza near humanitarian convoys or aid distribution points run by US group

  • Deaths near aid points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and near humanitarian convoys

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The UN human rights office said Friday it has recorded 613 killings in Gaza near humanitarian convoys and at aid distribution points run by an Israeli-backed American organization since it first began operations in late May.

Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the rights office was not able to attribute responsibility for the killings. But she said “it is clear that the Israeli military has shelled and shot at Palestinians trying to reach the distribution points” operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

She said it was not immediately clear how many of those killings had taken place at GHF sites, and how many occurred near convoys.

Speaking to reporters at a regular briefing, Shamdasani said the figures covered the period from May 27 through June 27, and “there have been further incidents” since then. She said she was basing the information on an internal situation report at the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Shamdasani said the figures, compiled through its standard vetting processes, were not likely to tell a complete picture, and “we will perhaps never be able to grasp the full scale of what’s happening here because of the lack of access” for UN teams to the areas.


Israeli military prepares plan to ensure Iran cannot threaten country, defense minister says

Updated 04 July 2025
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Israeli military prepares plan to ensure Iran cannot threaten country, defense minister says

  • Longtime enemies engaged in 12-day air war in June
  • Israel and Iran agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire on June 24

DUBAI: The Israeli military is preparing an enforcement plan to “ensure that Iran cannot return to threaten Israel,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told senior military officials.

He said the military must be prepared, both in intelligence and operations, to ensure Israel has air superiority and to prevent Tehran from reestablishing its previous capabilities.

He made his remarks following a 12-day air war between the longtime enemies in June, during which Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities, saying the aim was to prevent Tehran developing a nuclear weapon.

Iran denies seeking nuclear arms and that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.

Israel and Iran agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire that ended hostilities on June 24.


Trump expects Hamas decision in 24 hours on ‘final’ Gaza peace proposal

Updated 04 July 2025
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Trump expects Hamas decision in 24 hours on ‘final’ Gaza peace proposal

  • Israel has earlier agreed on terms for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday it would probably be known in 24 hours whether the Palestinian militant group Hamas has agreed to accept what he has called a “final proposal” for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza.

The president also said he had spoken to Saudi Arabia about expanding the Abraham Accords, the deal on normalization of ties that his administration negotiated between Israel and some Gulf countries during his first term.

Trump said on Tuesday Israel had accepted the conditions needed to finalize a 60-day ceasefire with Hamas, during which the parties will work to end the war.

He was asked on Friday if Hamas had agreed to the latest ceasefire deal framework, and said: “We’ll see what happens, we are going to know over the next 24 hours.”

A source close to Hamas said on Thursday the Islamist group sought guarantees that the new US-backed ceasefire proposal would lead to the end of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Two Israeli officials said those details were still being worked out. Dozens of Palestinians were killed on Thursday in Israeli strikes, according to Gaza authorities.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered in October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, Israeli tallies show.

Gaza’s health ministry says Israel’s subsequent military assault has killed over 56,000 Palestinians. It has also caused a hunger crisis, internally displaced Gaza’s entire population and prompted accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Israel denies the accusations.

A previous two month ceasefire ended when Israeli strikes killed more than 400 Palestinians on March 18. Trump earlier this year proposed a US takeover of Gaza, which was condemned globally by rights experts, the UN and Palestinians as a proposal of “ethnic cleansing.”

Abraham Accords

Trump made the comments on the Abraham Accords when asked about US media reporting late on Thursday that he had met Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman at the White House.

“It’s one of the things we talked about,” Trump said. “I think a lot of people are going to be joining the Abraham accords,” he added, citing the predicted expansion to the damage faced by Iran from recent US and Israeli strikes.

Axios reported that after the meeting with Trump, the Saudi official spoke on the phone with Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of Iran’s General Staff of the Armed Forces.

Trump’s meeting with the Saudi official came ahead of a visit to Washington next week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


Darfur civilians ‘face mass atrocities and ethnic violence’

Updated 04 July 2025
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Darfur civilians ‘face mass atrocities and ethnic violence’

  • Medical charity warns of new threat from escalation in fighting in Sudan civil war

KHARTOUM: Civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan face mass atrocities and ethnic violence in the civil war between the regular army and its paramilitary rivals, the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres warned on Thursday.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have sought to consolidate their power in Darfur since losing control of the capital Khartoum in March. Their predecessor, the Janjaweed militia, was accused of genocide in Darfur two decades ago.

The paramilitaries have intensified attacks on El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state which they have besieged since May 2024 in an effort to push the army out of its final stronghold in the region.
“People are not only caught in indiscriminate heavy fighting ... but also actively targeted by the Rapid Support Forces and their allies, notably on the basis of their ethnicity,” said Michel-Olivier Lacharite, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ head of emergencies. There were “threats of a full-blown assault,” on El-Fasher, which is home to hundreds of thousands of people largely cut off from food and water supplies and deprived of access to medical care, he said.


Egypt on alert as giant dam in Ethiopia completed

Updated 04 July 2025
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Egypt on alert as giant dam in Ethiopia completed

ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia moved on Thursday to reassure Egypt about its water supply after completing work on a controversial giant $4 billion dam on the Blue Nile.

“To our neighbors downstream, our message is clear: the dam is not a threat, but a shared opportunity,” Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said.

“The energy and development it will generate stand to uplift not just Ethiopia. We believe in shared progress, shared energy, and shared water. Prosperity for one should mean prosperity for all.”

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is 1.8 km wide and 145 meters high, and is Africa's largest hydroelectric project. It can hold 74 billion cubic meters of water and generate more than 5,000 megawatts of power — more than double Ethiopia’s current output. It will begin full operations in September.

Egypt already suffers from severe water scarcity and sees the dam as an existential threat because the country relies on the Nile for 97 percent of its water. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Sudan’s leader Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan met last week and “stressed their rejection of any unilateral measures in the Blue Nile basin.” They were committed to safeguarding water security in the region, Sisi’s spokesman said.