Gaza’s largest hospital has been gutted. Combat bulldozers have moved sand into the courtyards. The buildings are scorched. It smells like death. Israeli commandos pulled out before dawn on Monday.
A sprawling medical campus that housed maternity wards, surgery suites and emergency rooms has been mostly destroyed after two weeks of intense assault by Israeli troops battling Hamas militants who Israel said were barricading themselves inside the complex.
. . .
The IDF offered a narrow view — a pinhole, really — but what we saw was destruction on a massive scale. Military censors did not review our words or photos.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A sprawling medical campus that housed maternity wards, surgery suites and emergency rooms has been mostly destroyed after two weeks of intense assault by Israeli troops battling Hamas militants who Israel said were barricading themselves inside the complex.
The Israeli special forces described close-quarter combat with desperate fighters from Hamas who had been taken by surprise and barricaded themselves in emptied hospital wards, including elevator shafts and operating rooms.
“There was no medical care or drinking water or food” for the first three days of the raid, according to Mohamed al-Sikafi, 18, who texted with The Post last Tuesday after making it out of al-Shifa to a nearby hospital, one of the few still functioning in the north.
Reporters were led to an unlit room for a briefing by a top officer in the navy special operations unit called Flotilla 13, one the most secretive in the Israeli forces, famous since the founding of the Jewish state.
The colonel said that after the Israeli forces left the hospital after the first raid in November, Hamas fighters streamed back into the complex to take up arms, seek shelter and mix with civilians.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British Palestinian doctor who spent several weeks tending to the wounded at al-Shifa last year, said Monday that his friend and colleague Ahmad Maqadmeh, “a beautiful soul and a great surgeon,” was among the dead.
The original article contains 1,746 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!