Israel raids West Bank hospital as clashes erupt with Hamas in northern Gaza
One of the Israeli soldiers wore medical scrubs, another a white coat and a surgical mask. Their team stormed into the West Bank hospital with guns, took up positions near the waiting room chairs, then entered a patient's room and killed a Hamas commander.
Fifteen minutes later they were gone.
Tuesday's raid took place as the The Israeli army fought Hamas on multiple fronts: with the dramatic operation in the West Bank, renewed clashes in northern Gaza and below the surface of the territory. The Israeli military confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that its engineers had begun pumping seawater into the vast Hamas tunnel network under Gaza.
Israel's latest efforts in the nearly four-month war came amid a renewed effort by several peace mediators, including the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt, to reach an agreement to pause the fighting. Hamas's political head, Ismail Haniyeh, said on Tuesday he was studying a proposal for a temporary ceasefire that emerged from talks between officials from those countries in Paris.
But even as those talks continued behind closed doors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again asserted that Israel would keep fighting until it achieved a “complete victory.” And the raid on the Ibn Sina Specialized Hospital in the northern West Bank city of Jenin suggested that Israel would continue to pursue Hamas leaders across the region.
Israeli forces have attempted to attack Hamas leaders and their allies both inside Gaza and beyond. Earlier this month, Hamas blamed Israel for an explosion in Lebanon that killed its deputy political head, and Iran blamed Israel for an airstrike that killed senior Iranian military figures in Syria.
Israeli forces have escalated efforts against Palestinian militant activity in the West Bank, arresting more than 2,980 Palestinians in almost daily raids since the war began, with more than 1,350 of them linked to Hamas, according to the Israeli military. According to director Niji Nazzal, the raid on the hospital lasted less than fifteen minutes on Tuesday.
Surveillance video issued The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry showed several armed men in civilian clothes – including one wearing a white medical coat and another in blue scrubs – walking through hospital halls brandishing weapons.
They went to a room where Hamas commander Mohammad Jalamneh, 27, was visiting a friend and shot him and two other men, the city's top Palestinian health official, Wisam Sbeihat, said.
“They killed these three people, including a patient,” said Dr. Sbeihat in a telephone interview.
In a statement, Hamas mourned Mr. Jalamneh and described him as a leader in the Al-Qassam Brigades, the faction's armed wing. A local militia linked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed that his associates – the patient Basil Ghazawi and his brother Mohammad – had been members.
Dr. Nazzal said Basil Ghazawi had been receiving treatment in the hospital's rehabilitation department since late October, when he was paralyzed by shrapnel from an Israeli drone strike that struck his spine. This could not be independently confirmed, but the Israeli military said at the time that a drone had shot at Palestinian gunmen who had thrown explosives and shot at Israeli soldiers in Jenin.
The hospital raid raises questions about international law, experts say. Hospitals require special protection and respect under the laws of war, although that protection ends if the buildings are used for military purposes, said Eliav Lieblich, an expert on international law at Tel Aviv University.
If Mr Ghazawi was paralyzed and unable to defend himself, he should not have been subject to attacks under international law, Professor Lieblich said. “Whether this was the case here is a question of fact,” he said.
The Israeli military said all three men killed in the attack were involved in militant activities, including attacks on Israelis. It said Mr Jalamneh planned “to carry out a terrorist attack in the near future and was using the hospital as a hideout.”
Israel's incursions into the West Bank escalated as violence grew out of the war in Gaza, which began after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks in Israel killed what Israelis say about 1,200 people. The death toll in Gaza has now passed 26,000, according to Palestinian health officials.
Israeli ground forces entered northern Gaza in late October and have since shifted their focus to the south of the area, where heavy fighting has raged for weeks. But in recent days it has also flared up again in the north.
On Sunday, a deafening roar rang out around Gaza City, which is located in the north and was the enclaves' most populous city before the start of the war. Powerful explosions lit up the night sky.
“The situation was calm, but then there were violent bombings, shelling and clashes,” said Ghada Ikrayyem, 23 years old. solar panel technician, said in an interview. “It was extremely dangerous.”
The Israeli military said in December it was approaching “full operational control” of northern Gaza, but this week's fighting highlighted how much of the enclave remains a battlefield.
A big part of the challenge, Israeli officials say, is the network of tunnels that Hamas has built under Gaza over the years.
The military's statement Tuesday that it was flooding some of the tunnels was the first public acknowledgment of a controversial project that some military officials say is ineffective and that the United Nations has warned could damage Gaza's drinking water and sewage systems to damage.
The army said it had started pumping seawater to flush militants from the labyrinthine underground network, which Hamas has used to carry out attacks, stockpile weapons and imprison Israeli hostages. it said it had “implemented new capabilities to neutralize the underground terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza Strip by channeling large amounts of water into the tunnels.”
Senior Israeli military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, estimated this month that the underground network is between 350 and 700 kilometers long — extraordinary figures for an area that is only 40 kilometers long at its longest point. Two of the officials said there are nearly 5,700 individual shafts leading to the tunnels.
Overall, the flood project has had limited success, officials said. Large amounts of water have been pumped in, but many of the tunnels are porous, causing seepage into the surrounding ground rather than a flood through the passages.