Israeli forces raided one of the last hospitals operating in northern Gaza yesterday, igniting fires and forcing many staff and patients outside to strip in winter weather, health ministry officials said.
Kamal Adwan Hospital has been hit multiple times over the past three months by Israeli troops waging an offensive against Hamas fighters in surrounding neighbourhoods, according to staff. The ministry said a strike on the hospital a day earlier killed five medical staff.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli strikes killed at least 25 people, including 15 people in a single house in Gaza City, medics and the civil emergency service said.
The Palestinian health ministry said contact with staff inside the hospital in Beit Lahiya had been lost. “The occupation forces are inside the hospital now and they are burning it,” ministry director Munir Al Bursh said.
Youssef Abu El Rish, the Hamas-appointed deputy health minister, said Israeli forces had set fire to the surgical department, laboratory and a storehouse.
Health ministry officials said troops forced medical personnel and patients to assemble in the yard and remove their clothes. Some were led to an unknown location, while some patients were sent to the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which was knocked out of operation after an Israel raid this week.
Israeli troops during raids frequently carry out mass detentions, stripping men to their underwear for questioning in what the military says is a security measure as they search for Hamas fighters.
Bursh said the army had ordered 350 people to leave Kamal Adwan for a nearby school sheltering displaced families. They included 75 patients, their companions, and 185 medical staff.
“Fire is ablaze everywhere in the hospital,” an unidentified member of the staff said in an audio message posted on the social media accounts of hospital director Hossam Abu Safiya. The staffer said some evacuated patients had been unhooked from oxygen. “There are currently patients who could die at any moment,” she said.
Since October, Israel’s offensive has virtually sealed off the northern Gaza areas of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya and levelled large parts of them. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced out but thousands are believed to remain in the area, where Kamal Adwan and two other hospitals are located. Troops raided Kamal Adwan in October, and on Tuesday troops stormed and evacuated the Indonesian Hospital.
The area has been cut off from food and other aid for months , raising fears of famine. The UN says Israeli troops allowed just four humanitarian deliveries to the area from December 1 to December 23.
The Israeli rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel this week petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice seeking a halt to military attacks on Kamal Adwan. It warned that forcibly evacuating the hospital would “abandon thousands of residents in northern Gaza.” Before the latest deaths on Thursday, the group documented five other staffers killed by Israeli fire since October.
Israel’s nearly 15-month-old campaign of bombardment and offensives has devastated the territory’s health sector. A year ago, it carried out raids on hospitals in northern Gaza, including Kamal Adwan, Indonesian and Al Awda Hospital, saying they served as bases for Hamas, though it presented little evidence.
Israel’s campaign has killed more than 45,400 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, and wounded more than 108,000 others, according to the Health Ministry. Its count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
More than 90 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have been driven from their homes, most of them now sheltering in sprawling, squalid tent camps in south and central Gaza.
Children and adults, many barefoot, huddled yesterday on the cold sand in tents whose plastic and cloth sheets whipped in the wind. Overnight temperatures can dip below 10C, and sea spray from the Mediterranean can dampen tents just steps away.
“I swear to God, their mother and I cover ourselves with one blanket and we cover (their five children) with three blankets that we got from neighbours. Sea waters drowned everything that was ours,” said Muhammad Al Sous, displaced from Beit Lahiya in the north.
The children collect plastic bottles to make fires, and pile under the blankets when their only set of clothes is washed and dried in the wind.
At least three babies in Gaza have died from exposure to cold in recent days, doctors there have said.
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