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    11 months ago

    National Post: Director of a Gaza hospital says clinics were used by Hamas fighters: Ahmed Kahlot tells Israeli interrogators he was recruited into the terror group as a lieutenant colonel

    The director of a Gaza hospital admitted to Israeli interrogators that he had been recruited by Hamas to help turn the Strip’s medical centers into military facilities, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) announced on Tuesday.

    In a video released by the Shin Bet, Ahmed Kahlot, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, said, “I was recruited to Hamas in 2010 at the rank of lieutenant colonel. There are employees in the hospital who are military operatives of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam [Hamas’s “military branch”]—doctors, brothers, paramedics, clerks, staff members.”

    Kahlot added, “They hide in hospitals because they believe that a hospital is a safe place. They will not be harmed if they are inside a hospital.”

    Israel security forces arrested Kahlot on Dec. 12.

    During the interrogation, Kahlot describes how Hamas used hospitals and ambulances to hide operatives, launch military activity, transport members of terror squads and even deliver a kidnapped Israeli soldier.

    “Hamas has offices inside the hospitals. There are places for senior officials, they also brought a kidnapped soldier there. There is a designated place for investigations, internal security and special security. They all have private phone lines inside the hospital,” he said.

    Regarding the kidnapped soldier, Kahlot explained that “Hamas uses private ambulances. It has a different color, and no license plate. It was used to bring the kidnapped soldier and to transfer bodies. It comes and goes and does not take down the wounded.”

    Kahlot told the interrogator: “Once I begged them to take a wounded man to the Indonesian hospital, for healing, for treatment. They refused. Their mission is more important.”

    Hamas’s leaders, he continued, “are cowards. They left us in the field while they hide…. They destroyed us.”

    Palestinian doctors are not trustworthy because many of them are members of the Hamas terrorist organisation.