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Health personnel prepare premature babies to be transferred to Egypt after they were evacuated from Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, at the Emirates Crescent Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, November 20, 2023. Haitham Imad, EPA-EFE/File.
GENEVA, Switzerland -- Israel on Thursday accused the World Health Organization of collusion with Hamas by ignoring Israeli evidence of the "terrorist use" of hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
Ambassador Meirav Eilon Shahar told a meeting of the WHO's executive board that there could not be health in the Palestinian territory when Hamas "embeds itself in hospitals and uses human shields".
In "every single hospital that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) searched in Gaza, it found evidence of Hamas' military use," she said.
"These are undeniable facts that WHO chooses to ignore time and time again. This is not incompetence; it is collusion."
War erupted when Hamas and other militants from Gaza launched the unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel which claimed about 1,140 lives, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized 250 hostages, and Israel says around 132 remain in Gaza. That number includes the bodies of at least 28 dead hostages, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel, in response, vowed to crush Hamas and launched a relentless military offensive that the Palestinian territory's health ministry says has killed at least 25,700 people -- about 70 percent of them women and children.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of having tunnels under hospitals and using the medical facilities as command centers, a charge denied by the Islamist group.
WHO has not confirmed the allegations.
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Richard Peeperkorn, the WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, told reporters on December 21 that "we on our missions have not seen anything of this on the ground", adding that WHO was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used".
"The role of WHO is to monitor, analyze and report... We are not (an) investigating organization."
But Eilon Shaher alleged the UN health agency "knew hostages were held in hospitals and that terrorists operated within".
"Even when presented with concrete evidence of what was happening below ground and above ground ... WHO chooses to turn a blind eye, jeopardizing those they are meant to protect."
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