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The prominent director of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, was pulled out of an evacuation convoy and detained by Israeli forces for allegedly working with Hamas militants.
The sides had initially signaled the four-day pause — allowing the parties to start the complex process of exchanging dozens of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners stipulated in the agreement — would begin Thursday morning. The agreement, if enacted, would mark the first cessation of the raging violence in almost seven weeks. Israel’s emergency government approved it early Wednesday.
But the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Tzachi Hanegbi, had warned Wednesday night that no captives were likely to be freed before Friday morning, leaving the families of hostages and prisoners to endure another day of waiting — and for those in Gaza, more airstrikes.
Israel’s military said it had carried out more than 300 strikes in the enclave in the last day. Near Rafah, in the southern reaches where hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans had fled to escape the fighting up north, an airstrike on Thursday left many dead and wounded and more fleeing.
The Gaza Health Ministry said the head of al-Shifa Hospital was detained by Israeli forces Thursday while accompanying evacuating patients, prompting the ministry to suspend coordination of such convoys with the World Health Organization.
The Israel Defense Forces accused Mohamed Abu Salmiya of allowing Hamas to use tunnels under Gaza’s largest hospitals to coordinate their activities. The role of hospitals has become one of the key controversies of the conflict, with Israel depicting them as being centers of militant coordination. Palestinians deny the accusation and have repeatedly condemned their targeting.
In its statement, the IDF claimed it had “evidence showing that the Shifa Hospital, under his direct management, served as a Hamas command and control center.” So far the IDF has only produced images of weapons allegedly found in the hospital after its forces took control of it last week and a tunnel it said runs beneath it.
Diplomats in the region downplayed fears that the deal was faltering, saying the basic terms, which allow for the exchange of 50 Israeli captives for 150 prisoners during the temporary truce, were holding firm. Qatar, which has played the lead role in brokering between Israel and Hamas, said talks to iron out final details were “continuing and progressing positively” and they expected to announce a schedule for launching the plan Thursday.
“The start of the pause agreed upon will be announced within the next few hours,” Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement posted on social media early Thursday.
Israeli officials did not provide specifics on the holdup, but reiterated that they expected the agreement to take effect soon. An official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss deliberations, told The Washington Post that the government expected more clarity on the timeline to emerge Thursday, leading to a Friday launch of the agreement. News organizations meanwhile have speculated that the delay relates to the mechanisms to release the hostages and the nature of the aid to be allowed into Gaza.
“There are all sorts of small details they are trying to finalize in the hostage return deal,” Zeev Elkin, a member of Israel’s Knesset, told reporters.
Israel’s Supreme Court Thursday continued to turn aside legal challenges to the hostage-for-prisoner swap, ruling against three petitions brought by victims’ advocates. Israel allows citizens who have been victims of militant attacks to challenge the release of prisoners, but the Supreme Court has never previously blocked a deal.
Under the agreement, Israel will release three Palestinians — women or teenagers — it now holds in its prisons in exchange for the safe return of 50 hostages. Israel has said it could extend the pause in bombing by a day for every additional 10 hostages who are released after the initial group of 50.
Israel will also allow humanitarian agencies to deliver more fuel, food and medicine into Gaza during the pause, up to 300 trucks a day according to one aid official.
The agreement, which has yet to be implemented, comes as the United Nations and other international humanitarian organizations are increasingly sounding the alarm over the situation in the embattled enclave after almost seven weeks of strikes.
“This is as bad as it gets,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator, said to CNN Wednesday, citing how four out of five people in Gaza have been displaced. “Gaza is a global crisis.”
The Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday that more 13,300 people have been killed since the start of the war, 35,180 wounded and about 6,000 people are missing. The figures, dated Tuesday, did not include figures from the al-Shifa and Indonesian hospitals, the ministry said.
The tally is the ministry’s first update of casualties in the enclave since Nov. 10, when communication failures and fighting kept it from maintaining a daily count.
Israeli attacks on medical infrastructure have been a recurring issue during the fighting and on Wednesday the toll from the shooting at a Doctors Without Borders convoy trying to evacuate wounded staff members from Gaza City rose to two, the organization said.
“I honestly don’t know how much more our staff can take,” wrote Natalie Thurtle, an emergency physician working with the organization, describing the lingering death of an injured staff members over four days after further requests for evacuation failed.
In a statement after the attack, MSF, as the organization is known, said the group said the evacuation convoy followed an itinerary provided by the Israeli army. After being blocked at a checkpoint for several hours, the convoy turned back and then came under fire near the MSF office. “The vehicles were clearly marked with the group’s large red logo,” staff said.
In a statement Thursday, the IDF said that the convoy of vehicles that was driving “suspiciously in their direction,” and that its forces “fired warning shots in order to warn the vehicles from approaching. No hits were identified.”
Hezbollah and Israel also traded fire along the Lebanon-Israel border in clashes that have steadily escalated in recent weeks, fueling concerns of a wider war. Hezbollah strikes on Israel have reached as many as a dozen attacks a day in recent days. Five Hezbollah members, including the son of a senior Hezbollah official, were killed in an Israeli strike Wednesday night, a Hezbollah media spokesperson told The Washington Post.
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