Israeli soldiers opened fire inside a hospital in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday during a raid to seize the bodies of alleged fighters targeted in earlier airstrikes, a Palestinian doctor working at the hospital told The Associated Press.
Soldiers entered the Turkish Hospital complex in Tubas after the bodies of two Palestinians killed and one wounded in airstrikes in the northern West Bank on Tuesday were brought there, said Dr. Mahmoud Ghanam, who works in the hospital’s emergency department. The troops briefly handcuffed and arrested Ghanam and another doctor.
“The army entered in a brutal way, and they were shooting inside the emergency department,” said Ghanam. “They handcuffed us and took me and my colleague.”
The military confirmed that its troops were operating around the hospital searching for those targeted in the airstrikes, which they said had hit a militant cell near the Palestinian town of Al-Aqaba in the Jordan Valley. It denied that troops had entered the hospital building or fired gunshots inside.
The soldiers left after learning that the wounded man had been transferred to another hospital, Ghanam said. The soldiers wanted to take the bodies of the two men killed in the strike, but the hospital’s manager refused to hand over the bodies, Ghanam said.
Israeli raids on hospitals in the West Bank are rare but have grown more common since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. In Gaza, Israeli troops have systematically besieged, raided and damaged many hospitals.
About 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza ignited the war there. Israel has carried out near-daily military raids in the West Bank that it says are aimed at preventing attacks on Israelis — attacks which have also been on the rise.
Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek all three territories for an independent state.
