JERUSALEM, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Israel published video on Sunday of what it described as a tunnel dug by Palestinian militants under the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital, a focus of its search-and-destroy missions against Hamas in a war now in its seventh week.
TLDR of Newsweek Article:
Fact Check: Did Israel Build Bunker Under Shifa Hospital?
The Ruling: True
Multiple sources have corroborated that a bunker or basement was built at Israel’s discretion in the 1980s.
It remains unclear whether Hamas operates the space beneath the hospital as a major military headquarters, even though the IDF has presented evidence of weapons stashed in the hospital.
To be clear, I personally think a concrete basement and a bunker are two different things, but without more details it’s difficult to know what the reality is.
I also find it annoying that the IDF video has multiple cuts and jumps, rather than showing directly from how you get to this tunnel from the hospital proper.
It makes it incredibly difficult to compare it to the building plans from then to see if this tunnel is indeed new or not. Which is maybe on purpose by the IDF on how they made the video?
Country invades another country. Is outraged to find that country’s military.
So this is a new tunnel that didn’t exist before? And is not a part of the large basement tunnel complex Israel made when they built al-Shifa in the 80’s?
I believe literally no-one, at any point, has claimed the tunnel is new.
I mean, the article above claims that the IDF said so in their video. And the long-standing claim by Israel has been that Hamas dug an entirely new network of tunnels beneath the hospital.
It would be strange if they were just meaning the tunnels they themselves made decades ago.
