While White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby stated on Tuesday that the US has information that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are using some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al Shifa, and the tunnels beneath them for their military operations and to to hide hostages and weapons. the hospital director says that he had to bury dozens of dead people in a mass grave after the Israeli attacks.

“There are corpses scattered in the corridors of the hospital complex and the refrigerated rooms of the morgues no longer have electricity,” said hospital director Mohamad Abu Salmiya, referring to the shortage in the Gaza Strip due to the war and siege for Israel on October 9.

Israel has assured that the militia Hamas hosts a complex command and control infrastructure underground.

Hamas, Kirby explains, uses Al Shifa, the main hospital in the Gaza Strip, “as a control center” and “probably for the storage of equipment and weapons.”

“They have weapons stored there and are prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility,” he said, speaking to media aboard the presidential plane Air Force One, describing these events as a “war crime.”

The United States, Kirby said, does not support attacking hospitals from the air and does not want to see “hospital shootings” with “helpless, sick people trying to get the medical care they deserve.”

“Hospitals and patients must be protected. “And this just shows how challenging the military operation is, because Hamas has become deeply entrenched among the civilian population and Israel now has an additional burden to bear because of the way Hamas operates,” he said.

Gaza’s main hospital, at the center of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, had to bury dozens of the dead in a mass grave, its director announced on Tuesday, and thousands of civilians remain trapped inside the complex in a “terrible” situation. UN.

Hamas: More massacres

The Hamas militia rejected John Kirby’s accusations, claiming that these statements will incite Israel to commit more massacres.

“These statements give a green light to the Israeli occupation to carry out more brutal massacres against hospitals, with the aim of destroying Gaza’s healthcare system and expelling Palestinians,” the Palestinian Islamist Movement said in a statement.

The UN Humanitarian Coordination Office warned on Tuesday that all hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip, where the densest part of the enclave’s health infrastructure is located, are no longer functioning, with the sole exception of Al Ahli hospital, which has 500 people. patients and can receive some more despite the difficulties.

The situation in Al Shifa was the one that appeared most serious in recent days, as it is the main hospital center in Gaza, which has recently been the focus of armed clashes and damaged by Israeli bombardments.

According to the United Nations, there has been the past two days 32 patients and 3 premature babies died in Al Shifa due to the power outage and extremely poor conditions.

The latest information received from that hospital shows that on Monday there were between 600 and 650 hospitalized patients, between 200 and 250 staff and 1,500 internally displaced persons, while 36 babies in incubators and patients requiring dialysis were at risk to die.

The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of hospitals in the north of the Strip, but the World Health Organization stated that this amounted to a death sentence due to the collapse of the medical system as a whole and that hospitals in the south had no capacity whatsoever. – and they still don’t have it – to accommodate evacuated patients. (JO)