UNITED NATIONS - Israel on Friday (Jan 3) defended its raid on a north Gaza hospital last week while the UN human rights chief called the justification unsubstantiated and the World Health Organisation urged Israel to release the hospital's director from detention.

Israel's UN ambassador in Geneva, Daniel Meron, posted on social media a letter he sent on Friday to the WHO and Volker Turk, the UN human rights official. It said the raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital a week ago was "triggered by irrefutable evidence" that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants were using the hospital.

He said Israeli forces had taken "extraordinary measures to protect civilian life while acting on credible intelligence."

Turk told the UN Security Council on Friday that Israel did not "substantiate many of these claims, which are often vague and broad. In some cases, they appear to be contradicted by publicly available information."

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