Almost 48 hours after entering Gaza’s largest medical complex, the Israeli military escorted New York Times journalists through a landscape of wartime destruction on Thursday night to a stone-and-concrete shaft on its grounds with a staircase descending into the earth — evidence, it said, of a Hamas military facility under the hospital.

But Colonel Elad Tsury, commander of Israel’s 7th Brigade, said Israeli forces, fearing booby traps, had not ventured down the shaft at the hospital, Shifa. He said it had been discovered earlier in the day under a pile of sand on the northern perimeter of the complex.

In the darkness, it was unclear where the shaft led or how deep it went, although the military said it had sent a drone down at least several metres. Electrical wiring was visible inside, along with a metal staircase.

The controlled visit will not settle the question of whether Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules the Gaza Strip, has been using Shifa Hospital to hide weapons and command centres, as Israel has said.

The claim is central to Israel’s defence of the death toll caused by its military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 11,000 people, according to health officials in Gaza.

Israeli officials say the extreme loss of life has been caused in part by Hamas’ decision to hide its military fortifications and command centres inside civilian infrastructure like Shifa. Hamas denies the accusation.

The Israeli military has said that Hamas used a vast maze of tunnels underneath the hospital as a secret base, but since announcing early on Wednesday that its troops had entered the grounds, the military has yet to present public documentation of such an extensive network.

As the international community increasingly demands protections for civilians in Gaza, Israel is under pressure to demonstrate that the hospital — and the tunnel network it said it concealed — were important enough military targets to justify the immense cost in Palestinian lives.

New York Times News Service