Israeli forces conducted a raid on Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza on Wednesday in what has become the latest inflection point in the war as it relates to the tactics used by both them and Hamas militants.

The raid was a "precise and targeted operation against Hamas," Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said, adding that the troops who carried out the operation included medical teams and Arabic speakers to assist civilians caught in the crossfire.

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Israeli leaders have called for Hamas, which United States officials disclosed on Wednesday operate a command post underneath the Shifa hospital and others, to surrender peacefully and end the hostilities that have threatened the hundreds of people in the facility, including patients, medical workers, and civilians sheltering from the war there.

Israel is required by the law of war to do everything in its power to prevent the loss of civilian casualties, but that responsibility is only made harder to achieve by the actions of Hamas, which intentionally embeds itself within and underneath the civilian community to both protect themselves and because they know if Israeli forces kill civilians, it will lead to international condemnation. Hamas's decision to operate within the hospitals is a violation of the law of war, National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said on Wednesday.

Hamas's decision to put its command posts underneath hospitals and other protected civilian entities puts a target on the hospital for Israeli forces, while the Shifa hospital and surrounding areas have also been serving as a shelter for thousands of people, according to CNN.

The hospitals in Gaza have been overwhelmed, and the healthcare system is under significant strain, with insufficient amounts of international aid to supplement the limited resources they still possess.

"We don't want to see innocent civilians, patients, medical staff, become victims of crossfire between Hamas and Israeli Defense Forces. We believe that hospitals should be protected. And this, of course, as I said yesterday, places an added burden on the Israeli Defense Forces as they conduct their operations around al-Shifa. We know that Hamas uses hospitals like al-Shifa for command and control for storage facilities, even sometimes, as a barracks of sort for their fighters," Kirby added, arguing that Israel has an "added burden here because it is hospital because there are real patients and real doctors and real nurses that have nothing to do with this fight that need to be protected as much as possible."

The U.S. was not informed ahead of time about the raid before it occurred, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden spoke hours prior to it, Kirby added, noting that the U.S. does not expect to be given advanced warnings on their operations.

The raid on Shifa represents the latest flash point in the war that began in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in which the actions of the Israeli forces have been scrutinized and the way both sides' supporters react to the development.

U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths said he was "appalled" by reports of the raids.

"The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff and all civilians must override all other concerns. Hospitals are not battlegrounds," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Other moments where Israel's tactics were heavily scrutinized include their airstrikes in the Jabaliya area, a densely populated refugee area, even though Israeli leaders said the target of the strikes was Ibrahim Biari, who they said was the commander of Hamas's Central Jabaliya Battalion, and was killed during it. Israeli officials also said the damage from the strike was compounded by the tunnels underneath the area, where the Hamas fighters hide and store their weapons.

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Israel's military has agreed to daily pauses in the war and has dropped leaflets over different areas of northern Gaza, encouraging residents to evacuate south, and yet many thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting that has gone on for roughly five weeks now. The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry has claimed that more than 10,000 people have been killed since the war began, though that number does not differentiate between civilian and combatant, and U.S. officials have questioned the reliability of the ministry's data.

The United Nations agency that operates in the Palestinian territories, UNRWA, has said that at least 70% of Gaza's population has been displaced since the war began.