Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says U.S. officials stand behind Israel’s claim that Hamas is using civilian facilities such as Shifa hospital in Gaza as “command centers.”
“With regard to command centers, we ourselves have information that that’s exactly what Hamas is doing,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview broadcast Thursday night on the PBS “Newshour” program.
“This is an ongoing operation, and I fully expect that as the operation is completed, Israel will show more evidence of what Hamas was doing in these hospitals or under these hospitals, because that’s where the tunnels are,” he said. “What we know across the board is that Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure — in and under apartment buildings, in and under hospitals, in and under schools — and it uses people as human shields.”
His comments came after Israeli officials circulated videos this week purporting to show evidence that Shifa Hospital is a Hamas command center. The videos show rifles and ammunition near medical equipment in the hospital.
Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations have criticized Israel’s military attack on Shifa, asserting that the videos circulated by the Israeli government Thursday do not give sufficient evidence to justify revoking the hospital’s status as protected by the laws of war.
When pressed about the videos during the interview, Mr. Blinken said the videos alone do not explicitly prove that Hamas was using Shifa as a command center. But he then said: “If someone can explain why there are assault rifles next to MRI machines, that would be good to know.”
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He separately questioned why, in his view, there had been no matching public outcry over Hamas’ tactic of using civilians as human shields as it fights off an Israeli ground and air offensive in the densely populated Palestinian enclave.
Recent PBS polling showed that while a majority of Americans say their sympathies mostly lie with Israel in its war against Hamas, a growing number of Americans say Israel’s response has been too heavy-handed in Gaza. Palestinian authorities say more than 11,000 Gaza residents have been killed in the retaliatory campaign after a Hamas rampage on October 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals.
When asked what he would tell Americans who are increasingly uncomfortable seeing images of civilians, including children, killed by the Israeli campaign in Gaza, Mr. Blinken told PBS that the situation “is incredibly gut-wrenching and it’s heartbreaking.”
“But we also have to ask ourselves what would we do,” he added, “and what would any country do when faced with this terrorist organization that had slaughtered its people and then said very clearly that it intended to do it again and again and again if given the ability to do that, the capacity and the ability to do that — and that’s the problem that Israel has to deal with; it’s a problem that any of us have to deal with,” he said.
The secretary of state then added: “The other thing is I don’t hear the cry for Hamas to respect international humanitarian law, for Hamas to maybe get out of the buildings, to get out of the hospitals, to get out of the schools so that civilians aren’t endangered, for Hamas to surrender.”
“That would protect Palestinian civilians immediately,” Mr. Blinken said. “I’m not hearing anyone say that.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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