No Hezbollah assets found in Lebanon hospital facing Israeli bombing

A swarm of journalists and cameramen opened drawers filled with scrubs and bed linens, rummaged through boxes of surgical tools, and meandered through the basement of Sahel Hospital, in southern Beirut, entering even its morgue and toxic waste closets. 

A warning from the Israeli army on Monday evening that Hezbollah was storing “hundreds of millions of dollars in paper currency and gold” underneath the hospital shocked its staff and invited the press on Tuesday to inspect the area. 

Israel provided no evidence for its claim that cash was being kept under the hospital. Instead, it circulated an animated graphic suggesting that a Hezbollah bunker was underneath the medical centre, where it said the group’s former secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike on 27 September, had sheltered. 

“When we first received the news we were in shock,” a nurse and educator at the hospital, Halimah el-Annan, told Middle East Eye from one of the ground floor examination rooms.

Annan has worked at the university hospital in Beirut’s southern neighbourhood of Haret Hreik for nearly 40 years. During this time, she said, she has never seen or felt any sort of construction or movement below her. 

“This is a private hospital belonging to the Alame family, which has no relation to Hezbollah, the Amal party, or any other political party,” Annan said.

Read more: No Hezbollah assets found in Lebanon hospital facing Israeli bombing