Israel releases Shifa Hospital director after 7 months

The Shin Bet and the IDF have released 50 Gaza detainees, including the director of Shifa Hospital Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who has been in administrative detention in Israel since November 23. Although Hamas was using Shifa Hospital as a terror base and to conceal hostages, there was never any concrete proof publicly produced that Abu Salmiya was directly involved in this. Back in November, a senior IDF source told The Jerusalem Post that Abu Salmiya had given suspicious answers when questioned about what he knew about Hamas’s systematic usage of his hospital, but suspicious answers without evidence cannot usually be used to hold someone in administrative detention for more than seven months. Documentation published at the time by Israel showed Hamas terrorists taking two hostages, a Nepali citizen and a Thai citizen, into Shifa Hospital, with one of them wounded and being led to a hospital bed while the other was walking. The IDF reinvaded Shifa Hospital in March, but by then Abu Salmiya had been in detention for several months and certainly could not be charged with anything related to Hamas’s more blatant terror activities during that period.