US challenged by Al Jazeera journalist over Gaza intelligence assessments

SHAH ALAM - In a Pentagon briefing with journalists, Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh informed Al Jazeera reporter Fadi Mansour that the United States (US) does not exist in Gaza at all.

In short reel on Instagram that has since gone viral, Mansour was seen grilling Sabrina on the US presence in Gaza.

He started by asking Sabrina if the US has any assets on the grounds in Gaza.

"We have no assets or boots on the grounds in Gaza," Sabrina firmly stated in the video.

It has been widely reported that the US have claimed that they gave collected information proving that Palestinian resistance have been using hospitals for military purposes.

Mansour goes on to ask Sabrina on how she has come to that conclusion or assessment and whether it was based from information received from Israel.

Sabrina then launched into a tirade of how she was not going to go into specifics on how the US collected its information.

"Well I am not going into specifics on how our intelligence is collected, what I can tell you is that there are multiple agencies as you know here within the department and across the administration that collect and analyse intelligence," she said in the video.

Mansour then reiterated his question to Sabrina by asking her to confirm that the US has no assets in Gaza that were entering the hospitals to basically confirm the information that has been shared.

“I will say it again we have no boots in the grounds in Gaza,” Sabrina reiterated.

Earlier on Wednesday the Israeli army had stormed the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

It was reported that Dr Muhammad Zaqout, the director-general of Gaza hospitals said that the Israeli army did not find any evidence of the members of the Palestinian resistance hiding in or around the hospital, contrary to their claims before storming the complex.

Palestinian freedom fighters Hamas held Israel and US President Joe Biden fully responsible for the repercussions of the storming of Al-Shifa and the safety of the medical staff as well as the displaced people sheltering there.

“The White House and the Pentagon’s adoption of the false (Israeli) occupation narrative claiming that the resistance is using the Al-Shifa Medical Complex for military purposes was a green light for the occupation to commit more massacres against civilians to force them to migrate from the north to the south to complete the occupation plan aimed at displacing our people,” Hamas said in a statement.

Palestinian Health Minister Mai Al-Kaila also issued a statement carried by the official Wafa news agency holding the Israeli “occupation responsible for the lives of medical staff, patients and displaced people at the Al-Shifa complex.”

Al-Kaila warned of “catastrophic consequences for patients and medical staff if the occupation army carries out a storming of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex.”

Ismail Al-Thawabta, head of the Government Media Office in Gaza called storming the hospital a “war crime.”