INTENSE FIGHTING IS raging around Gaza’s biggest hospital where doctors said thousands of Palestinians were trapped in dire conditions, as Israel pledged to help evacuate babies from the crippled facility.
Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital has been caught in Israel’s ground offensive aimed at destroying Hamas, and the compound has been repeatedly hit by gunfire and strikes, one of which Gaza health officials said destroyed the cardiac ward today.
The Israeli military has denied deliberately targeting the hospital and has repeatedly accused the Islamist militant group ruling Gaza of using medical facilities or tunnels beneath them as command centres and hideouts – a charge Hamas denies.
Fears have intensified for patients and people taking refuge in Al-Shifa hospital and other healthcare facilities in Gaza, and medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that without a ceasefire or evacuation a hospital “will become a morgue”.
The conflict broke out after Hamas fighters crossed the militarised border with Israel on 7 October, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 240 people hostage, according to the most recent Israeli figures.
Israel’s relentless campaign in response has killed more than 11,000 people, also mostly civilians and including thousands of children, according to the latest figures from the health ministry in Gaza.
The ministry has not updated tolls for two days citing the collapse of hospital services.
Witnesses inside the Al-Shifa hospital told AFP by phone today that “violent fighting” had raged around the hospital the whole night.
The EU has condemned Hamas, claiming the group uses “hospitals and civilians as human shields” in Gaza, while also urging Israel to show “maximum restraint” to protect civilians from the war it is waging.
“The EU is gravely concerned about the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement.
“These hostilities are severely impacting hospitals and taking a horrific toll on civilians and medical staff,” the EU statement said.
“The EU emphasises that international humanitarian law stipulates that hospitals, medical supplies and civilians inside hospitals must be protected.
“Hospitals must also be supplied immediately with the most urgent medical supplies and patients that require urgent medical care need to be evacuated safely. In this context, we urge Israel to exercise maximum restraint to ensure the protection of civilians.”
“The EU condemns the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields by Hamas,” the statement said.
It reiterated Brussels’ stance that Israel has a “right to defend itself in line with international law and international humanitarian law”.
The EU called for speedy and “unhindered” humanitarian access so aid can reach Gazans suffering under more than a month of bombardment, displacement and extremely limited water, food, fuel and shelter.
It called on Hamas to release the 240 hostages its militants took captive during the 7 October attack on Israeli and said it was “crucial” that the International Committee of the Red Cross be given access to the hostages.
“The EU joins calls for immediate pauses in hostilities and the establishment of humanitarian corridors,” it said.
Bright flares lit up the night sky over Gaza City and blasts echoed across the city, AFP television images showed, as Israel’s air and ground campaign brought the fight to key medical installations.
“If we do not stop this bloodshed immediately with a ceasefire or at the bare minimum a medical evacuation of patients, these hospitals will become a morgue,” medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontières warned this morning.
Al-Shifa hospital is “totally surrounded and bombardments are going on nearby”, said the hospital’s director, Mohammad Abu Salmiya.
“The medical team cannot work and the bodies, in their dozens, cannot be managed or buried,” he said.
Inside the hospital, Médecins Sans Frontières surgeon Mohammed Obeid said there was no water, power, food or internet access for about 600 post-operative patients, 37-40 babies and 17 people in intensive care.
Countless other people are seeking refuge in the hospital grounds.
The surgeon said in an audio message posted yesterday on social media that two babies died in the Al-Shifa neonatal unit after power to their incubators was cut off and a man also died when his ventilator shut down.
Patients are out “in the streets without care” after “forced evacuations” of two paediatric hospitals in Gaza, countering the Israeli army which said it secured safe passage for civilians.
“The forced evacuations of Al-Nasr and Rantisi paediatric hospitals have left sick people on the streets without care” in Gaza City, Mohammed Zaqut, director-general of hospitals in the Palestinian territory, told reporters.
“We have completely lost contact with the caregivers” at these two hospitals, he added.
The UN’s World Health Organisation has expressed alarm at the situation in Al-Shifa.
“WHO is gravely concerned about the safety of health workers, hundreds of sick and injured patients, including babies on life support, and displaced people who remain inside the hospital,” director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
Mike Ryan, Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, has said there is “no one and nowhere safe in Gaza today”.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor programme, he said there are 11 hospitals south of the Wadi Gaza line, where Palestinians have been warned to go for their safety.
“Of them, only three of them can do surgical intervention. They’re already full and full to overflowing. At this point, for the critically injured that could be possibly taken out of the northern part of Gaza, the only option is to take them out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing and into Egypt,” he said.
He said the WHO has no information “that would be convincing” that the Al-Shifa hospital is being used by Hamas.
“The doctors or nurses that are working there are working in a hospital with hundreds of workers, hundreds of patients, babies in incubators, people in intensive care. They’re working to try and save lives,” he said.
“Even in a case where a hospital or health facility is considered to be being used by an opposite force, there still stands under international law, the questions of proportionality and precaution. Even in a situation like that, it is incumbent upon the conflicting forces to be able to demonstrate proportionality.
“In other words, they need to be able to demonstrate that any loss of civilian life is absolutely minimised, that there are no direct attacks on patients or doctors or nurses and that there’s the highest level of precaution taken in that regard.”
The Israeli military pledged yesterday to aid the evacuation of babies from the hospital, noting that “staff of the Al-Shifa hospital has requested that tomorrow”.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari pledged that “we will help the babies in the paediatric department to get to a safer hospital. We will provide the assistance needed.”
Twenty of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “no longer functioning”, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency.
Very little aid has made it into Gaza in the five weeks of war, with the densely populated coastal territory effectively sealed off by a total blockade that Israel has vowed to maintain until the hostages are freed.
The Israeli military confirmed that a Jordanian plane dropped medical equipment and food to the Jordanian Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
The army declined to elaborate further, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry also made no comment.
As the fighting raged, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night ruled out a role for the current Palestinian Authority government in Gaza once the war is over.
“There will have to be something else there,” he said, when asked whether the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has partial administrative control in the occupied West Bank, may govern Gaza after the war.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month, said the PA could only assume power in Gaza if a “comprehensive political solution” is found for the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict encompassing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu also rejected further calls for a ceasefire, saying: “The war against (Hamas) is advancing with full force, and it has one goal, to win. There is no alternative to victory.”
In an interview earlier this week, he said that Israel would assume “overall security” over Gaza “for an indefinite period” after the war.
The intense fighting in northern Gaza has accelerated an exodus of people toward Gaza’s south.
In all, the Israeli army said Saturday that in the past three days around 200,000 Palestinians had left southwards from the area of the northern Gaza Strip where fighting is heaviest.
In Gaza’s south, arriving people were no longer able to find tents or improvised shelter, with some sleeping in the streets, according to AFP journalists.
Strikes were also hitting buildings at the southern end of Gaza in Rafah, the area to which civilians have been urged to evacuate.
A strike in southern Bani Souheila destroyed a dozen houses today, killing at least four people and wounded at least 30, said an AFP reporter at the scene.
Almost 1.6 million people have been internally displaced since 7 October, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA. This equals about two-thirds of Gaza’s population.
Around the world, the war has sparked Israeli commemorations for those killed and kidnapped on 7 October, and pro-Palestinian rallies decrying the plight of people in Gaza and demanding a ceasefire.
Police estimated 300,000 marched in London on Sunday to support Palestinians. Many carried placards proclaiming “Stop Bombing Gaza”, “Ceasefire Now” or “Free Palestine”.
The families of Israeli hostages spoke of their agony at a rally in Tel Aviv yesterday.
“I came here to shout for my kidnapped parents,” said Yair Mozes, whose parents were both abducted from Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel.
“We don’t know their situation and we need them to be released immediately.”
The conflict is stoking regional tensions and fears of the war expanding into neighbouring countries.
Israel fighter jets carried out strikes against “terror infrastructure” targets inside Syria in response to cross-border fire directed at the Golan Heights, the military said on Sunday.
Exchanges of cross-border fire have also taken place regularly along the frontier with Lebanon.
Speaking at a summit of Arab and Muslim leaders in the Saudi capital Riyadh, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called on Islamic governments to designate Israel’s military a “terrorist organisation”.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on Saturday warned Iran-backed Hezbollah that launching a war would result in widespread destruction in Lebanon similar to that in Gaza.
© AFP 2023, with reporting from Press Association
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