For weeks, Israel has claimed that the al-Shifa Hospital is above an underground Hamas "headquarters”, justifying its military interventions on the health complex. On November 16, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed to have discovered the entrance to an underground passage under the al-Shifa Hospital. While IDF videos serve as evidence of a tunnel structure under the hospital complex, it does not indicate who used it for what purpose.
“A significant 55-meter-long terrorist tunnel, 10 meters underneath the Shifa Hospital complex”: on November 19, the IDF claimed to have new elements proving that Hamas was operating an underground tunnel beneath al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza.
The same day they shared surveillance footage claiming to show hostages taken to the hospital on October 7, the IDF also shared new video clips showing an underground structure beneath the hospital. Dozens of metres long, the passageway ends at a white, blast-proof door.
These elements followed a previous video, shared on November 16 on Telegram and X, that shows a hole several metres deep, surrounded by debris.
This hole in the ground was reportedly discovered after the IDF detonated a vehicle located on the hospital compound under a white sheet metal hangar. According to the Israeli forces, the vehicle contained weapons and explosives.
Drone images published by the IDF show that the hole was in the same location as the car was parked. Satellite images available on Google Earth show that this hangar was built sometime between April 2021 and May 2022.
Israel has claimed since the beginning of the conflict that the al-Shifa Hospital has been used as a Hamas headquarters. But many pro-Palestinian accounts online have accused the IDF of lying about the underground structure they discovered. Most reject the hypothesis that the crater is an entrance to a tunnel.
A video of the tunnel filmed by a dog
However, the latest videos published by the IDF on their Telegram channel on November 19 confirm the presence of a tunnel underneath the al-Shifa hospital.
The first sequence, a single continuous shot without editing, filmed from a drone and lasting 1:29, does not show the tunnel, but films the gradual descent into a vertical concrete shaft several metres long. In this shaft, which the IDF says is 10 metres deep, you can see a dilapidated metal spiral staircase, which leads to the entrance of the tunnel shaft, according to the IDF.
The second uncut video, which lasts 3:27 and was also filmed on November 17, shows footage filmed by a search dog wearing a camera muzzle. The dog is not visible, but at 1:33 in the video, a soldier removed its muzzle.
After soldiers harnessed the dog and equipped it with a camera, the dog descends the vertical duct and heads down a tunnel several metres long – 55 metres, according to the IDF.
The dog then stops in front of a white armoured door, described by the IDF as "blast-proof" and equipped with a "firing hole".
"This type of door is used by the Hamas terrorist organization to block Israeli forces from entering the command centers and the underground assets belonging to Hamas," the IDF said on its Telegram account.
The FRANCE 24 Observers team analysed the video to look for signs of editing as the dog descends in the passageway and enters the tunnel. We found no indications that the footage was edited, which supports the claim that the hole at the al-Shifa Hospital complex indeed leads to this underground tunnel.
Confusion surrounding an edited IDF video
However, in the hours following the release of these new videos, the Israeli army was once again accused of lying about the presence of the tunnel at al-Shifa. This confusion is linked to a 2-minute edited video published by the Israeli army on X. Viewed more than 9 million times, the video contained extracts from both the drone and dog videos, with a cut between the two.
“The video, however, is clearly edited, starting with a water well surrounded by a severely excavated land, and then linking another video of an unknown tunnel,” claimed the pro-Palestinian Quds News Network on X on November 19, in a tweet viewed more than 400,000 times.
However, this claim is incorrect after viewing the entire video filmed with the search dog.
A tunnel used by Hamas?
What conclusions can we draw from this discovery? So far, there is no indication that the tunnel was used by Hamas. In the video of the tunnel, the passageway is empty.
But the infrastructure visible in these two new sequences seems, in any case, to be characteristic of tunnels used by the Palestinian organisation, according to several specialists.
Two experts on Hamas tunnels we spoke to said that the images show a tunnel typical of those used by Hamas.
"No doubt, this is the same pattern as the IDF exposed in Gaza," said Michael Milshtein, director of the Forum for Palestinian Studies at Tel Aviv University. "This is a military tunnel, and it's a Hamas tunnel".
"The shafts are well-known, and have been described by hostages who were released," Scott Savitz, an engineer at RAND Corporation, a research institute, told FRANCE 24.
When asked about the equipment seen in the video, he added that "blast-proof doors and firing holes are not only consistent with Hamas, but with anyone making tunnels who has time and resources".
Interviewed by Sky News, Daphne Richemond-Barak, a specialist in urban conflict and professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, who has previously visited Hamas tunnels on the border between Gaza and Israel, also confirmed to Sky News that "what we saw in those images is very classic of Hamas tunnels".
Proof of Hamas's underground headquarters?
Who built these tunnels? In an interview with CNN on November 21, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (1999-2001) explained that the hospital has had underground infrastructure for many years.
“It was four decades ago that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of these compounds.”
Barak claims the tunnels have since been taken over and used by Hamas.
In a video published on October 27, three weeks before the tunnel was discovered, the IDF said: "We have located Hamas’s headquarters underneath the Shifa hospital compound".
The video featured what the IDF called an "intelligence-based illustration": 3D graphics depicting "multiple underground complexes" at five points across the sprawling hospital compound, with men in Hamas uniforms patrolling "a complex spider web of terrorist infrastructure".
However, the video published on November 19 shows a single empty tunnel. The FRANCE 24 Observers team has so far been unable to verify Israeli claims that the passage leads to a larger network of tunnels.
