Israeli tanks are lined up today outside the gates of Gaza’s largest hospital, which Israeli authorities describe as a strategic hideout for Hamas, with US President Joe Biden calling for the health facility to be “protected” and for Israeli troops to show restraint. as thousands of civilians remain trapped there.

Amid tensions at Gaza’s Shifa hospital, the Israeli military today confirmed the identity of a female soldier in the hands of Hamas, after the Palestinian armed movement released a video showing the young woman being held captive.

“We are with all our hearts on the side of the Marciano family, whose daughter, Noah, was brutally abducted by the terrorist organization Hamas,” the Israeli military said in a statement released around midnight, thus confirming – for the first time – the identity of one of the approximately 240 hostages in the Gaza Strip after Hamas attacked Israeli territory on October 7.

The release of the video came at a time when Hamas accused the Israeli army of “delaying and avoiding” fulfilling the conditions it set for it in negotiations mediated by Qatar, pointing out that it intends to proceed with the release of 70 women and children held hostage in the Strip. Gaza in return for declaring a five-day ceasefire and delivering humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave.

Israel “asks for the release of 100 (hostages), we informed the mediators that we could release hostages if we received five days of ceasefire – that is, a ceasefire and the passage of aid for (…) all our people, throughout the Gaza Strip , but the enemy is evading,” the spokesman for Hamas’ military arm, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Ubaydah, said via Telegram.

The day before Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of a possible agreement on the release of hostages, a necessary condition for a ceasefire, according to him.

Family members of hostages plan to march from Tel Aviv to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem to pressure him to secure their release.

“Protect” Sifa

According to the UN, about 10,000 Palestinians (patients, staff, displaced by the fighting) are crammed into the hospital – possibly even more, if what local officials say is taken into account. “The situation is very bad”, it is “inhumane”, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) stressed, via X (the former Twitter).

“I hope and expect” that the Israeli army will show caution in its operation in Shifa, US President Joe Biden said yesterday, before adding that this hospital “must be protected”.

Clashes have been raging around the hospital for days between Hamas fighters and the Israeli army, which accuses the Palestinian Islamist movement of installing infrastructure in a network of tunnels under the hospital and using the sick and displaced as “human shields”.

The purpose of Chahal, the Israeli army, is “to quickly remove the people (…) as many as possible,” its spokesman, Peter Lerner, said overnight.

“We have no electricity, no water, no food in the hospital,” said an MSF doctor. “People will die in the next few hours without artificial respiration support machines in operation,” he added, while the army, for its part, spoke of “efforts” to transport incubators from an Israeli hospital in Shifa.

The deputy health minister of the Hamas government, Yousef Abu Ris, said on Monday that “seven babies who were born prematurely” and “27 patients in intensive care units” had died since Saturday due to the power cut at the hospital.

“Control”

Israel has been pounding the Gaza Strip relentlessly since the attack launched on its territory by Hamas militants on October 7, and since October 27 has been conducting a ground operation with the stated aim of “wiping out” the Palestinian Islamist movement that rules the small Palestinian enclave.

On the Israeli side, some 1,200 people were killed, according to the official count of the authorities, the vast majority of them civilians, on the first day of the attack, a scale unprecedented since the founding of the state in 1948.

As the war enters its 39th day, Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip has killed at least 11,240 people, the vast majority of them civilians, including 4,630 children, according to Hamas’ health ministry.

Chahal, the Israeli military, announced that it continued to conduct “raids targeting terrorist infrastructure installed in government buildings, in the heart of the civilian population, including schools, universities, Islamic mosques.”

Smoke billowed from the Martyrs’ Mosque in central Gaza City yesterday, while alarms rang out in the deserted streets, footage captured by AFP cameras showed.

Hamas “lost control of Gaza” and its fighters “are fleeing to the south”, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallad assured yesterday.

According to the UN, about 1.6 million of the enclave’s 2.4 million residents have been forced to flee their homes because of the war.

In Buraij, in the central part of the Gaza Strip, families from the north continued to move south, on foot or in carts. There has been destruction “everywhere”, “even the birds have been killed”, reported Adel Samalach, as he continued on his way.

Lebanon, West Bank, Egypt

On the night of Monday to Tuesday, exchanges of fire were again unfolding between the Israeli army and armed organizations in Lebanon, among them the powerful Hezbollah, close to Iran and an ally of Hamas.

“Following fire from Lebanon on Monday night, Israeli army fighter jets hit Hezbollah infrastructure” in Lebanon, including “command centers,” Chahal said in a statement.

An Al Jazeera journalist was lightly wounded by Israeli fire, according to the Qatari television network and a local official, as he and other media correspondents covered the shelling in southern Lebanon.

According to the head of a hospital in the occupied West Bank, six Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers in the Tulkarem sector, where tensions have been running high since the Israel/Hamas conflict erupted. At least 180 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers or Jewish settlers since October 7, according to Palestinian authorities.

While in Rafah, on the one hand, international humanitarian aid intended for civilians in Gaza continues to arrive at a slow pace – but the quantities passing through are insufficient, the UN emphasizes – and, on the other hand, some 550 foreigners and people with dual citizenship were able to leave the enclave yesterday, according to Palestinian officials.