Inside the secret tunnel where Israel says a senior Hamas leader died

Two feet wide and less than six feet tall, the tunnel led deep beneath a major hospital in the southern Gaza Strip.

The underground air bore the stench of what smelled like human remains. After walking about 40 metres along the tunnel, we found the likely cause.

Outside the hospital’s emergency department, where officials say Israel excavated the earth to gain access to a hidden tunnel.Credit: Getty Images

In a tiny room to which the tunnel led, the floor was stained with blood. It was here, according to the Israeli military, that Mohammed Sinwar – one of Hamas’ top militant commanders – was killed last month after a nearby barrage of Israeli strikes.

What we saw in that dark and narrow tunnel is one of the war’s biggest Rorschach tests, the embodiment of a broader narrative battle between Israelis and Palestinians over how the conflict should be portrayed.

The military escorted a reporter from The New York Times to the tunnel on Sunday afternoon, as part of a brief and controlled visit for international journalists that the Israelis hoped would prove that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as a shield for militant activity.

To Palestinians, Israel’s attack on and subsequent capture of the hospital compound highlighted its disregard for civilian activity.

Last month, the military ordered the hospital’s staff and patients to leave the compound, along with the residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Then, officials said, they bored a huge hole, about nine metres deep, in a courtyard within the hospital grounds. Soldiers used that hole to gain access to the tunnel and retrieve Sinwar’s body, and they later escorted journalists there so we could see what they called his final hiding place.

There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself, so we lowered ourselves into the Israeli-made cavity using a rope. To join this controlled tour, the NYT agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.

To the Israelis who brought us there, this hiding place, directly underneath the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital, is emblematic of how Hamas has consistently endangered civilians and broken international law by directing its military operations from the cover of hospitals and schools.

Hamas has also dug tunnels underneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and a United Nations complex elsewhere in that city.

An Israeli soldier walks in a tunnel beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.Credit: AP

“We were dragged by Hamas to this point,” Brigadier General Effie Defrin, the chief Israeli military spokesperson, said at the hospital on Sunday afternoon.

“If they weren’t building their infrastructure under the hospitals, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t attack this hospital.”

Defrin said Israel had tried to minimise damage to the hospital by striking the area around its buildings, without a direct hit on the medical facilities themselves. “The aim was not to damage the hospital and, as much as we could, to avoid collateral damage,” he said.

To the Palestinians who were forced from here, the Israeli attack on Sinwar embodied Israel’s willingness to prioritise the destruction of Hamas over the protection of civilian life and infrastructure, particularly the health system.

According to the World Health Organisation, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. Many, like the European Gaza Hospital, are now out of service, fuelling accusations from rights groups and foreign governments – strongly denied by the Israelis – that Israel is engaged in genocide, in part by wrecking the Palestinian health system.

“It’s morally and legally unacceptable, but Israel thinks it is above the law,” Dr Salah al-Hams, the hospital spokesperson, said in a phone interview from another part of southern Gaza.

Although Israel targeted the periphery of the hospital site, leaving the hospital buildings standing, al-Hams said the strikes had wounded 10 people within the compound, damaged its water and sewage systems and dislodged part of its roof. It killed 23 people in buildings beyond its perimeter, he said, 17 more than were reported the day of the attack.

The subterranean room in which Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar and four other militants are said to have died.Credit: AP

The tremors caused by the strikes were like an “earthquake,” al-Hams said.

Al-Hams said he had been unaware of any tunnels beneath the hospital.

Even if they were there, he said, “This does not justify the attack. Israel should have found other ways to eliminate any wanted commander. There were a thousand other ways to do it.”

Our journey to the hospital revealed much about the current dynamics of the war in Gaza.

In a roughly 20-minute ride from the Israeli border, we saw no Palestinians – the result of Israel’s decision to order the residents of southern Gaza to abandon their homes and head west to the sea. Many buildings were simply piles of rubble, destroyed either by Israeli strikes and demolitions or Hamas’ booby traps. Here and there, some buildings survived, more or less intact; on one balcony, someone had left a tidy line of potted cactuses.

We drove in open-top jeeps, a sign that across this swath of south-eastern Gaza, the Israeli military no longer fears being ambushed by Hamas fighters. Until at least the Salah al-Din highway, the territory’s main north-south artery, the Israeli military seemed to be in complete command after the expansion of its ground campaign in March.

Israeli army vehicles transport a group of soldiers and journalists inside the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday.Credit: AP

The European Gaza Hospital and the tunnel beneath it are among the places that now appear to be exclusively under Israeli control.

Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in rare cases. If a medical site is used for military purposes, it could be regarded as a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.

The Israeli military said it had tried to limit harm to civilians by striking only around the edges of the hospital compound. But international legal experts said that any assessment of the strike’s legality needed to take into account its effect on the wider health system in southern Gaza.

In a territory where many hospitals are already not operational, experts said, it is harder to find legal justification for strikes that put the remaining hospitals out of service, even if militants hide beneath them.

When we entered the tunnel, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle – stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said – dangled from a hook in the corner.

It was not immediately clear how Sinwar was killed, and Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions.

An Israeli soldier walks in a tunnel near the European Hospital.Credit: AP

If gases released by such explosions intentionally poisoned Sinwar, it would raise legal questions, said international law experts.

“It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb – a generally lawful weapon – if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Defence Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasise here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said.

In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to check for traps.

Defrin denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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