Israeli military detains al-Shifa Hospital director, senior doctors in Gaza

The Israeli military has reportedly detained the director of al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip along with several other medical staff, as the occupying regime continues its attacks on the facility in the besieged enclave.

Khalid Abu Samra, a department chief at the hospital said on Thursday that Mohammad Abu Salmiya has been detained along with several other senior doctors.

The news was also confirmed by Salmiya’s cousin, Adham Abu Selmiya, in a post on the social media platform X.

Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza, has been a major focus of Israel’s offensive, with the regime claiming that it houses a “command center” belonging to the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has described as “desperate” the situation in al-Shifa, saying the medical complex has become a “death zone.”

The situation has forced “scores of sick and injured, some of them amputees” to flee the hospital towards the south without ambulances, along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, the WHO said on Sunday.

Tel Aviv has long accused Hamas of using hospitals for housing Palestinian resistance fighters and their equipment and as a launchpad for directing military operations against the occupying regime.

Under such pretexts, the regime has been targeting hospitals in the besieged enclave since the beginning of its war on Gaza last month.

Hamas has dismissed Israel’s allegations, saying it runs a vast network of underground tunnels and doesn’t need to use hospitals in any manner.

The Palestinian resistance group has called on the UN to form an investigative team in order to debunk Tel Aviv’s allegations.

According to the Gaza-based health ministry, at least 14,500 Palestinians have been killed in the strikes, most of them women and children, and injured around 35,000 others since October 7.

Tel Aviv has also imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.