Gaza Hospital Director: Hamas Used Hospital As Military Facility

The IDF has received much criticism for entering Gazan hospitals to search for Hamas members, weapons storehouses, command centers, and entry points inside the hospitals to the tunnels underneath. Many of the Gazan medical personnel, such as the director of the Al-Shifa Hospital, have steadfastly denied that Hamas had any presence in their hospitals. But now Ahmed Kahlot, the director of one of the largest hospitals in Gaza,, confirms Israel’s claim about Hamas using hospitals to conceal its men and weapons. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on his admission that Hamas used his hospital as an operational hub can be found here: “Gaza hospital director admits Hamas used medical complex as operational hub,” Times of Israel, December 19, 2023:

The director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya has revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation that his northern Gaza hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point, it had housed a kidnapped soldier.

In footage published on Tuesday by the Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces, hospital director Ahmed Kahlot could be seen telling an Israeli interrogator that Hamas had offices inside the hospital and used it as a base for operational activity.

According to Kahlot, who said he has been a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, some 16 members of the hospital’s staff — including doctors, nurses and paramedics — were Hamas operatives serving in the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terror organization.

He added that several members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades were also employed in the hospital.

On December 12, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said that Israeli forces had entered the Kamal Adwan hospital, which the IDF later confirmed. Over the course of several days, troops detained some 90 operatives inside the hospital and seized numerous weapons.

According to a joint Shin Bet and IDF statement on the operation, some of those captured at the hospital had participated in the October 7 massacres in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 240 were taken hostage.

Asked about Hamas operations inside the hospital complex, Kahlot revealed that one Hamas leader and two senior officials had offices inside the hospital.

“There are places for senior officials. They also brought a kidnapped soldier there,” he said.

“There is a designated space for interrogations, internal security and special security. They all have private phone lines within the hospital.”

No further information about the kidnapped soldier’s identity or when he was brought to the hospital was provided.

“They hide in hospitals because they believe that hospitals are a safe place,” Kahlot told the Shin Bet interrogator. “They will not be harmed if they are inside a hospital.”

But the IDF is no longer playing by its previous rules, according to which it would not enter hospitals. In its determination to destroy Hamas once and for all, it is not leaving any site, including hospitals, free from search.

In addition to operating out of the hospital, Hamas operates its own private ambulances, which are a different color from those used by medics.

According to Kahlot, the ambulances used by Hamas aren’t ever volunteered for medical uses.

“Once I begged them to take a wounded man to the Indonesian Hospital or Shifa Hospital for treatment. They refused,” he said. “Their mission was more important.”…

The Hamas “ambulances” are used not just to carry Hamas wounded to hospitals, but more often to transfer its fighters and weapons, protected “as ambulances” — so Hamas believes — from Israeli attack. Hamas refuses to allow any non-Hamas member, however serious his condition, to use its ambulances.

That’s it. Direct confirmation from the mouth of Ahmed Kahlot, director of one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, and himself a member of Hamas, revealing in a Shin Bet interrogation the use — misuse, abuse — of the Kamal Adwan Hospital by Hamas. As for Kahlot himself, having seen the destruction that Hamas has brought upon Gaza in response to its atrocities on October 7, he will now have nothing to do with it, or its leaders in Gaza, He is contemptuous of the leaders of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar and Mohamed Deif, for hiding out while their operatives are taking a beating. Kahlot dares to say — as he never would have said when Hamas was riding high on October 7 — that “the leaders of Hamas are cowards. They left us in the field while they’re hiding in concealed places. They destroyed us.”