[Source: Reuters]

Israeli troops entered Gaza’s biggest hospital on Wednesday and were searching its rooms and basement, witnesses inside the complex said.

The operation followed a days-long siege that caused global alarm over the fate of thousands of civilians trapped inside.

Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City has become the main target of the Israeli ground operation in northern Gaza. Israeli forces say the hospital sits atop tunnels housing a headquarters for the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas whose fighters are using patients as shields, a claim which Hamas denies.

The IDF has encircled the hospital complex on three sides, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI Critical Threats Project, a research group tracking IDF movements within Gaza. Witnesses described a situation that appeared calm, if tense, as Israeli troops moved between buildings carrying out searches.

The IDF said its operation in Al Shifa was “precise and targeted” in a “specified area” of the hospital. The complex includes many buildings, housing a maternity ward, chest and dialysis units, a surgery and an outpatient clinic.

In a post published Oct. 27, the IDF said Hamas had hidden underground military complexes beneath the hospital, including a command and control centre, used “to direct terrorist activities and rocket fire and to manufacture and store a variety of weapons and ammunition”.

The IDF has claimed Hamas uses hospitals throughout Gaza to conduct military operations and uses patients and medical staff as human shields or hostages, a claim Hamas denies.

On Monday, the IDF released video it said was taken within Rantisi Hospital in northern Gaza City, which it said showed weapons and explosives and a room where hostages may have been kept.

The IDF also released footage it said showed a group of men at the gates of al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, one of whom appeared to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Israel said it had killed “approximately 21 terrorists” at al-Quds in return fire after fighters shot from the hospital entrance.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Friday that one person was killed and 28 others, mostly children, were wounded in a shooting by Israeli forces at al-Quds. The group said a convoy sent to evacuate patients and staff had been unable to reach the hospital.

On Wednesday, a senior Israeli military official said soldiers had “already found weapons and other terror infrastructure” within Al Sharif hospital premises. “In the last hour, we saw concrete evidence that Hamas terrorists used the Shifa hospital as a terror headquarter,” he said.

Hamas denied this.

World attention has been focused on the fate of hundreds of patients trapped inside Al Shifa which lacks power to operate basic medical equipment, and the thousands of displaced civilians who had sought shelter there. Gaza officials say many patients including three newborn babies died in recent days as a result of Israel’s encirclement of the facility.

Israel has told civilians to leave and medics to send patients elsewhere. It says it has attempted to evacuate babies from the neonatal ward and left 300 litres of fuel to power emergency generators at the hospital entrance, but the offers were blocked by Hamas.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the Israeli military incursion into Al Shifa Hospital was “totally unacceptable”.

“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” he told reporters in Geneva, adding that the WHO had lost touch with personnel at Shifa and more broadly had received no reports on the number of deaths and injuries in Gaza over the last three days.