Israeli tanks took up positions at the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital yesterday, the chief target in Israel’s battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip and where medics said patients including newborns were dying for lack of fuel.
Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al Qidra, who was inside Al Shifa hospital, said 32 patients had died in the last three days, including three newborn babies, as a result of the siege of the hospital and lack of power.
At least 650 patients were still inside, desperate to be evacuated to another medical facility. Israel says the hospital sits atop tunnels housing a headquarters for Hamas fighters using patients as shields, which Hamas denies.
“The tanks are in front of the hospital. We are under full blockade. It’s a totally civilian area. Only ... hospital patients, doctors and other civilians staying in the hospital. Someone should stop this,” a surgeon at the hospital, Dr Ahmed El Mokhallalati, said by telephone.
“They bombed the (water) tanks, they bombed the water wells, they bombed the oxygen pump as well. They bombed everything in the hospital. So we are hardly surviving.”
US President Joe Biden said yesterday that Shifa hospital must be protected and that he hoped there would be less intrusive action there.
Since Israel launched its campaign last month, thousands of Gazans have been killed and two thirds of the population made homeless. Israel has ordered the total evacuation of the northern half of Gaza. Gaza medical authorities say more than 11,000 people have been confirmed killed, around 40 per cent of them children.
Fighting also took place yesterday at a second major hospital in northern Gaza, Al Quds, which has stopped functioning. The Palestinian Red Crescent said the hospital was surrounded by heavy gunfire, and a convoy sent to evacuate patients and staff had been unable to reach it.
Israel said it had killed “approximately 21 terrorists” at Al Quds in return fire after fighters shot from the hospital entrance. It released footage it said showed a group of men at the hospital gate, one of whom appeared to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Hamas media said more than 30 people were killed and scores injured in an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalia refugee camp in Northern Gaza. An Israeli military spokesperson said the army was checking the report on Jabalia.
In Israel, sirens sounded across the centre of the country and in the city of Tel Aviv yesterday night, with Hamas’ armed wing saying on its Telegram account that it had fired a batch of missiles at Tel Aviv.
There was also fresh concern that the war could spread beyond Gaza, with an upsurge of clashes on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and the US launching air strikes on Iran-linked militia targets in neighbouring Syria.
At Al Shifa, the enclave’s biggest hospital, Gaza health ministry spokesperson Qidra said Israeli snipers and drones were firing into the hospital, making it impossible for medics and patients to move around.
Israel has told civilians to leave and medics to send patients elsewhere. It says it has attempted to evacuate babies from the neo-natal ward and left 300 litres of fuel to power emergency generators at the hospital entrance, but the offers were blocked by Hamas.
Qidra said Shifa needed 8,000-10,000 litres of fuel per day delivered by the Red Cross or an international agency.
Dr El Mokhallalati, the surgeon, said premature babies that would normally be in individual incubators were being lined up eight to a bed, kept warm with whatever power was left.
After three died there were 36 alive in the neo-natal unit, he said. “We are expecting to lose more of them day by day.”
UN agency UNRWA is now housing around 800,000 people in Gaza, or half of those made homeless by the fighting. It said yesterday its emergency fuel depot for the enclave had finally run dry and it would soon be unable to run ambulances, resupply hospitals, provide drinking water or pump sewage.
US and international forces based in northeastern Syria were targeted at least four times in less than 24 hours with drones and rockets, a US military official said yesterday, adding there had been no casualties.
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