Israel-Hamas War Latest Updates: As many as 28 of all the prematurely born babies evacuated from war-torn Gaza's al-Shifa hospital were brought into Egypt for medical treatment on Monday, according to live footage and Egypt's al Qahera TV. The Palestinian Red Crescent had evacuated 31 babies with assistance from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Sunday from the al-Shifa hospital, which was stormed by Israeli forces last week.
The hospital, the biggest in the Gaza Strip, has become the flashpoint of the deadly armed conflict that began with Hamas' October 7 onslaught on Israeli territory. Israel claims al-Shifa sits atop an underground Hamas military command centre connected to the vast network of tunnels spread beneath the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military seized al-Shifa in search of the said Hamas command centre.
Here Are The Latest Updates:
1. A first batch consisting of 28 premature babies evacuated from Gaza's beseiged Al-Shifa hospital were transported to Egypt for medical treatment on Monday. It was initially unclear how many infants were part of the batch.
2. Live footage aired by Al Qahera showed medical staff carefully lifting tiny babies from inside an ambulance and placing them in mobile incubators, which were then wheeled across a car park towards other ambulances.
3. Before being brought across the border from Gaza, the infants were, on Sunday, shifted to a hospital in Rafah in the southern half of the Palestinain exclave so their condition could be stabilized ahead of the transfer to Egypt.
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4. The IDF on Sunday shared a CCTV footage, which it said was proof of al-Shifa's usage as a "terrorist infrastructure" by Hamas. The clip carries a timestamp of 10:53am on October 7, the day Hamas militants carried out their rampage across southern Israel and abducted several people from the Israeli territory.
"EXPOSED: This is documentation from Shifa Hospital from the day of the massacre, October 7, 2023, between the hours of 10:42 am and 11:01 am in which hostages, a Nepalese civilian and a Thai civilian, were abducted from Israeli territory are seen surrounded by armed Hamas terrorists," the IDF wrote while sharing the aforementioned footage on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
5. Israel has stepped up accusations of Hamas using al-Shifa as a base of its operations, saying a soldier abducted during the October 7 rampage had been executed at the medical facility. The IDF claimed that Noa Marciano, the 19-year-old female Israeli army conscript whose body was recovered near the hospital last week, was "murdered" by a Hamas militant on the premises of the medical facility.
"According to intelligence information - solid intelligence information - Noa was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa hospital. There, she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist," chief spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said. Hamas had said Noa died in an Israeli air strike and had issued a video that appeared to show her corpse, unmarked except for a head wound. The Israeli military said a forensic examination found she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such a strike.
(With inputs from Reuters)