Gaza hospitals serve as terror hubs, Islamic Jihad spokesman confesses

Tarik Salame Uda Abu Salouf noted that hospitals have the convenience of “internet and electricity 24 hours a day” and are good places to coordinate attacks on Israel.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In a confession made to the Shabak that the intelligence agency publicized Thursday, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) member admitted that his organization and Hamas dominate all the hospitals in Gaza.

“Gaza terror groups use all of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip,” PIJ spokesman Tarik Salame Uda Abu Salouf told his interrogators.

The medical centers are meeting points, he said, where “Decisions are made in these rooms, for example if we want to attack Israel.”

“There is internet and electricity 24 hours a day,” he noted. “We take a room from the X-ray, emergency, internal medicine or a specialist department without closing the entire department.”

Abu also described specific departments in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital that were at the terrorists’ command.

“In Shifa there is the ambulance unit and the emergency room,” he said. “There is a fellow who has connections with one of the ambulance managers, so he uses him to transfer senior operatives, wanted men, wounded, and drives along with them.”

Abu Salouf had been captured in the Shifa Hospital during the IDF’s second seizure of the medical center last month, after intelligence revealed that Hamas and PIJ fighters had returned and were using it as a command center again in northern Gaza.

More than 200 terrorists were killed and over 500 were taken prisoner, proving the intelligence correct.

While the international community has been slamming Israel for its military incursions into Gazan hospitals, calling it a violation of international law, once a medical center is used as a military base it becomes a legitimate target by that very law. It is also a war crime.

Aside from the terrorists they have fought in the hospital compounds they have raided, IDF forces have found thousands of rifles, grenades, explosive devices, bullets and millions of shekels of cash hidden in patients’ rooms, staff offices and all kinds of examination rooms, along with terror tunnels running underneath.

Abu Salouf also described how Hamas, PIJ and other groups’ “communications departments” closely coordinate to get false stories out to the world, such as the “lie,” he said, that Israel struck the Al-Ahli Hospital in October, when it was “a PIJ rocket launch” that failed.

While much of the international press that seized the story walked this story back after the IDF quickly proved it to be false, according to Abu Salouf, foreign reporters are generally tame tools in the terrorists’ hands.

They allow the PIJ to review interviews with senior members of the political bureau before they’re published and will dump them if nixed, he said, because “they want to continue having access for additional interviews,” he said.

The PIJ spokesman added that foreign reporters told him they only want him to “talk about the humanitarian situation [in Gaza]” rather than any military activity, so the terrorists speak to them differently than to the Arab press. “We don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction and revenge,” he said.