Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest evidence of Hamas’ outrageous conduct.
Hamas has built makeshift torture chambers inside Gazan hospitals and schools where its men are interrogating and abusing fellow Palestinians suspected of disloyalty. The reign of terror comes as Hamas moves aggressively to reassert its power over the Gaza Strip, according to video testimonials and official government documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
More than eight months after a fragile ceasefire with Israel left Hamas badly wounded, the terror group has largely turned inward, establishing a strict police state and moving internal security operations—its dreaded “Interior Ministry”—back into the same civilian outposts it commandeered to wage war on Israel. Eyewitness accounts from three Gazans reveal that Hamas has again laid claim to al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest medical complex, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, and the al-Ma’amadani Hospital in Gaza City. The terror group has done the same with schools across Gaza, turning classrooms into prisons and detention centers where civilians are often subjected to brutal beatings and more creative forms of torture.
“They have prisons inside the schools, rooms that function like prisons,” recounted one Gazan activist who says he was abducted by Hamas and beaten for several days. “The same goes for hospitals. They have rooms underground in the basement that they use as a prison, as if they were military and security sites.” At the Nasser Hospital, said a second Gazan woman, “inside the Hind al-Daghma Dialysis Center, people are beaten and shot in the legs. If they send someone to the renal department at Nasser, it basically means it’s over.”
Jonathan Schanzer, a veteran regional analyst and executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said it is no surprise that Hamas is again staking claim to Gaza’s most important civilian centers.
“Hamas has always exploited the civilian infrastructure that it has wielded to deter Israel from attacking its military structures,” he said.
