Is Al-Shifa Hospital, as the IDF declares, a Hamas command post?

The images published by the IDF are part of its communications strategy. “Israel wants to be totally transparent, showing almost in real time what they find in the Gaza Strip, and particularly in the Al-Shifa hospital”, introduces Louis Augry, journalist at the “True or False” unit. On Friday, November 17, the army released a 7-minute video. In an excerpt, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus walks through the rooms of the hospital where he finds “arms, ammunition and military equipment”. The video was likely filmed on Wednesday.

The key word for Jonathan Conricus? Transparency. For this, he says he shoots a video “in a single take, without editing” of “all the evidence” found in the hospital building. It shows in particular a military bag, presented as that of a Hamas fighter. On Wednesday evening, journalists from Fox News and the BBC, embarked with the Israeli army, also toured the building and noted the addition of a weapon in a room. “That raises the question of the staging. Is the Israeli army changing the layout of the premises for the passage of journalists?”asks Louis Augry.

Rearrangement of places

The True or False team contacted the BBC, which says it has also asked the army for an explanation. “What they explain is that between the filming of the IDF video and their report, the Israeli army discovered new weapons which, if we understand correctly, would have been placed there afterwards”, indicates the journalist. For their part, Fox News journalists “were unable to independently verify where and when the objects were found on site”. “We have no reason to doubt that these weapons belonged to Hamas. (…) But here, it shows that the Israeli army does not hesitate to rearrange the premises before the arrival of the journalists, to that the signs of the presence of Hamas appear obvious”.

Hamas fighters are also hiding in tunnels under Gaza. For several weeks, the Israeli army has based itself on a reconstruction supposed to represent the organization’s headquarters under Al-Shifa hospital. On new images “published very recently”we can see a hole in the hospital area. “It’s supposed to be the entrance to a tunnel, according to the IDF. The problem is that at the moment, the army does not yet show images of the inside of these tunnels.specifies the journalist. “For the specific case of Al-Shifa hospital, we do not have any evidence that appears sufficient of the famous network that Israel has been talking about for weeks. All we have are these videos, these images that come to us from a single source, that of the Israeli army. We must keep in mind that we are dealing with war communications here, and that it deserves to be explained.”concludes Louis Augry.