Hamas in Gaza’s hospitals: an IDF commander on the fire rules

The commander

One interview in the film covers the Gaza war from north to south. The film was made independently by Roi Danino, Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman. The speaker is an IDF commander. His name is withheld; his role is not. He describes the rules his forces fired under near hospitals and other sensitive sites, and what they found inside. This page puts his account beside the law and the documents.

The fire rules

Fire is restricted in dense civilian areas, he says. Schools, kindergartens, mosques and clinics were marked as sensitive sites in the army’s systems, with safety radii of 200 to 300 meters around them. A shot inside that radius was not a decision for a small unit. Requests went up the chain: brigade, division, Command, and sometimes the Chief of Staff. And sometimes, he says, approval arrived after the target had moved. Think about that: rules of engagement strict enough to let the target walk away.

This is not a new practice. In its July 2009 report on the previous Gaza operation, the Government of Israel wrote that operational plans and rules of engagement ordered special precautions near United Nations and Red Cross facilities, hospitals, religious sites and educational institutions, almost 1,900 sensitive sites in the Gaza Strip, and that the IDF took care to map those sites in planning.

He also says that Hamas terrorists moved among civilians, sometimes with visible weapons and sometimes without. They were struck when they were assessed as a live threat, or when the movement was clearly military.

What the law says

Hospitals are not ordinary civilian objects. Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that the protection of civilian hospitals “shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy,” and that protection may cease only after due warning has been given, naming a reasonable time limit where appropriate, and after that warning has gone unheeded. The same 2009 Israeli legal paper quotes Additional Protocol I, Article 12(4): medical units must not be used “in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack.” The American Jewish Committee has set out the same structure for this war: the special protection is genuine, and it is lost when a medical site is used, outside its humanitarian functions, for acts harmful to the enemy.

The law cuts both ways. It forbids treating a functioning hospital as an ordinary target. It also forbids putting command rooms, weapons and terrorists inside one and then claiming the building cannot be touched. So which of the two did Hamas do? Whether each Israeli strike met the warning, distinction and proportionality tests is a separate question, answered on the facts of each case.

What was inside

Asked what forces found in buildings with a humanitarian function, the commander says the buildings he checked contained weapons or showed military use. He names Shifa Hospital: a headquarters, weapons, planning rooms. He also describes rifles, RPGs, mortars, explosives and tunnel shafts in such buildings.

He is not the only source. After staff and patients left Rantisi Hospital, the IDF reported a basement bunker used as a command and control center, filled with suicide vests, grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, explosive devices, RPGs and other weapons, and evidence that hostages had been held there. At Al-Shifa, the IDF said an operational command center, weapons and technological assets were found in the MRI building, and it later reported a tunnel shaft under the complex and a vehicle on the grounds packed with weapons. Lt.-Col. Ido, commanding the 551 Reserve Paratroop Battalion, said remaining terrorists of a large Hamas battalion were hiding in the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Hanoun and firing from it.

Washington confirmed it with its own intelligence. On 14 November 2023, U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used some hospitals in the Gaza strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and support their military operations and to hold hostages.” He added that they operated “a command and control node from al-Shifa,” that they had stored weapons there, and that the finding came from “a variety of intelligence methods — of our own,” not from Israeli agencies. Two days later, President Joe Biden said “one thing has been established: Hamas does have headquarters, weapons, materiel, below this hospital, and — I suspect — others.”

The findings are contested in scale and in legal characterisation. News organisations and aid groups have described a collapsed health system and have questioned how far military use ran through any given compound. That is not a judicial finding that any damaged clinic was an unlawful strike on a still-protected hospital. The real dispute is about facts: how far military use, which Washington said it had confirmed at Al-Shifa, had stripped protection in particular cases, and whether Israeli fire then stayed inside the remaining rules. Whoever claims it did not has to show it, case by case.

Aid, movement and schools

Asked about aid vehicles, the commander says that during humanitarian hours armed terrorists approached convoys, crowds gathered around trucks, and weapons were passed from the beds of pickups. Fuel was scarce for civilians and available to Hamas, he says, and most warehouses were under Hamas control. Israeli officials said Hamas used fuel for tunnel ventilators under hospitals rather than for hospital ventilators. The IDF later said it supplied 300 liters of fuel to Shifa, that Hamas did not allow the staff to accept it, and that soldiers guarded jerry cans left outside to stop theft. Aid organisations describe crowding, looting and shortages differently, and they place more weight on Israeli restrictions and combat damage.

Hamas also kept civilians from leaving, the commander says. He describes people turned back at a square by a small group of men, and he says intelligence supported this picture. In mid-October 2023 the IDF published imagery of a physical roadblock meant to keep civilians from moving south, and IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said there was “an active effort by Hamas to block and prevent the population from going south.” Recorded calls released by the army include residents telling officers that Hamas was not letting them leave. And when civilians stay, the commander says, the safety radius stays and the strike waits. One side kept people in the line of fire. By his account, the other held its fire.

During sweeps of school compounds used as shelters, he says, men were checked. In one action a third of the men checked were Hamas terrorists, some of them from 7 October. In other fast raids, dozens of terrorists were identified in the crowd, including commanders. Those figures are his account, not a published IDF statistical series.

What the law settles, and what stays open

The treaty rule is not in doubt: a hospital used for fighting loses its protection, after a warning. The open questions are factual: how often a given hospital or school was used for fighting, how high fire approval actually sat in each incident, and whether delay, warning and choice of munition matched the radii he describes. On Al-Shifa, U.S. intelligence has already answered the first. Hear the commander in his own words, then check him against the documents.

Naza: The Real Story puts combat in civilian areas on screen through an officer who fought there, named by role rather than by name. The film is free to watch online, with English subtitles.