The body of an elderly, cancer-stricken Hamas hostage was discovered Wednesday by the Israeli Defense Forces in a building adjacent to Gaza’s largest medical facility, where the army is being deliberate in conducting searches for Hamas assets.

Yehudit Weiss was a 67-year-old Israeli woman who was abducted from her home at Kibbutz Beeri on October 7. Her body was discovered in a building near Shifa hospital. “To our regret we didn’t get there in time to save her,” the IDF spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told reporters, adding that she was killed inside Gaza.

Prime Minister Netanyahu told CBS Thursday that several Israeli abductees had been held by Hamas at Shifa and were subsequently taken out. Separately, Admiral Hagari said that a large number of Hamas weapons were collected next to Weiss’s body.

The discoveries followed nearly two days during which doubts were widely raised about the Israeli and American assertion — including by President Biden — that Gaza City’s Shifa hospital has long served as Hamas’s military headquarters. 

As the IDF entered the sprawling medical complex on Wednesday, spokesmen were able to display to television cameras more than a dozen automatic rifles and “grab and go” kits for Hamas fighters. Yet, that evidence was far from enough for critics in the Arab world and beyond, who contended that a handful of guns are a far cry from full proof that the hospital has served as a terrorism nerve center.

Medical facilities are protected from military strikes under international law. According to the Geneva Conventions, such protection is void if a facility is used for military purposes. Yet, a small number of arms is not enough to remove the special protection afforded to hospitals, and that is what critics seized on. 

“Israel will have to come up with a lot more than a handful of ‘grab and go’ rifles to justify shutting down northern Gaza’s hospitals with its enormous cost for a civilian population with urgent medical needs,” a former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, wrote on X in reaction to a video that showed weapons hidden behind such installations as MRI machines.      

On Thursday, Admiral Hagari said that after many patients and civilians seeking shelter have left Shifa, some 2,000 are left behind. “No doctors or patients were harmed during our operation,” he said, adding that the IDF units are conducting “slow and deliberate” searches inside the large facility. 

Inside the hospital, he said, the troops encountered a booby-trapped vehicle containing “many combat devices.” He did not elaborate and supplied no visual evidence.

“You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military, hidden under a hospital,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday. The Israelis, he added, “did not go in with a large number of troops, did not raid, and did not rush anyone down.”

According to unconfirmed reports in Israel, dozens of dead bodies were taken from the hospitals by the IDF into Israel, leading to speculations that perhaps other hostages, beyond Weiss, were killed there. “I promise you, we do not hide anything from the public,” Admiral Hagari said. “We will update only when we have complete information.”

He also said that computers found at Shifa contained much new intelligence on the hostages, and that they were transferred back to Israel for further forensic examination. 

As of yet, IDF troops have merely just started getting into the tunnels underneath the hospital complex; military engineers are seeking explosives that Hamas terrorists may have left behind as they escaped. “This is a very complex operation, and we need time,” Admiral Hagari said.

Separately, the Israeli air force bombed and destroyed a tunnel in northern Gaza, killing several top Hamas military commanders, Admiral Hagari said. Nevertheless, the Israelis assess that Hamas’s chief in the Strip, Yahya Sinwar, and the top military commander, Mohammed Deif, have escaped to the southern part of the Strip. 

After nearly a million Gazan civilians have been evacuated from northern Gaza, Israel has almost completely refrained from bombing the south and ground forces have stayed away. Yet, on Thursday, the IDF dropped leaflets in central Gaza, warning civilians there to move to the protected area in the south. 

“We are close to destroying Hamas’s military capabilities in the north of Gaza,” the IDF’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said Thursday. Indicating that, pending government approval, the army would soon move farther south, he added, “We will continue to destroy the leadership, kill the operatives, and demolish infrastructure.”