Beirut, Lebanon – 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, who invited 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 been working at the university hospital in Beirut’s southern neighbourhood of Haret Hreik for nearly 40 years. During which 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.

“Sahel hospital is a civilian hospital. It must continue its work.”

However, she fears Israel might do to Lebanon what it has done in Gaza, where entire hospitals have been bombed under the justification of Hamas activities inside.

“We saw what happened in Gaza, anyone would be scared,” Annan said. 

Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW), told MEE that, “Medical facilities, such as hospitals, have special protection under international humanitarian law (IHL), so they cannot be attacked.”

“They cannot be attacked unless the facility is being used to commit – outside of its humanitarian function -attacks that are harmful to the enemy. The presence of millions of dollars of cash or gold underneath the hospital does not result in the hospital losing its protection.”