(The Australian, 20/11/2023)
Gaza’s largest hospital has become a “death zone,” the World Health Organisation said on Sunday, announcing plans to evacuate the facility, as Israel’s army said it was expanding operations to destroy Hamas.
The assessment came after a visit by WHO and other UN officials to al-Shifa hospital, which Israeli troops raided last week.
Elsewhere, a Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed on Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including on a UN school sheltering displaced people.
Social media videos verified by Agence France-Presse showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building where mattresses had been wedged under school tables, in Jabalia, the Palestinian territory’s biggest refugee camp.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, described “horrifying images” from the incident, while Egypt called the bombing a “war crime” and “a deliberate insult to the UN”.
A separate strike on Saturday on another building in Jabalia camp killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, Hamas health authorities said.
Without mentioning the strikes, the Israeli army said “an incident in the Jabalia region” was under review.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in response to the October 7 attacks, which Israeli officials say killed about 1200 people, most of them civilians, and saw about 240 people taken hostage.
The army’s relentless air and ground campaign has since killed 12,300 people, more than 5000 of them children, according to the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2007.
The UN says some 1.6 million people have been displaced inside the Gaza Strip by six weeks of fighting, and Israel said on Saturday its military was now “expanding its operational activities in additional neighbourhoods in the area of the Gaza Strip”.
Shifa in Gaza City has been a key focus in recent days, with Israeli forces alleging Hamas uses the hospital as a command centre – a claim denied by the group and Hamas-appointed medical staff.
On Sunday, the WHO said a UN assessment team reached the hospital and found a “death zone”, with a mass grave at the entrance and nearly 300 patients left inside with 25 health workers.
“WHO and partners are urgently developing plans for the immediate evacuation of the remaining patients, staff and their families,” the UN body said, warning that nearby facilities were already overstretched.
It urged an immediate ceasefire, given the “extreme suffering of the people of Gaza.”
On Saturday, hundreds of people fled the hospital on foot on orders from the Israeli army, according to the facility’s director.
Columns of sick and injured – some of them amputees – were seen making their way towards the seafront along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the complex. At least 15 bodies, some in advanced stages of decomposition, could be seen along the route, lined with heavily damaged shops and overturned vehicles, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
The streets “were destroyed, there were bomb craters and a lot of decomposing bodies” near the hospital, said Samia al-Khatib, 45, who left al-Shifa along with her husband and 15-year-old daughter. “There were scenes of horror, a real massacre,” she said.
Some clutched makeshift white flags as they made their way between dead bodies and heavily armed Israeli soldiers flanked by tanks and armoured vehicles.
Along a road lined by destroyed buildings and charred vehicles, children walked barefoot, elderly men leant on canes and the few who could afford it used horse-drawn carts to move south, where Israel has urged civilians to go.
One man carried his disabled daughter on his back. Another carried his injured daughter in his arms, a plaster cast on her tiny leg.
NGO Doctors without Borders said a convoy carrying its staff and family members came under attack on Saturday while evacuating from near al-Shifa, despite co-ordinating with both sides. One person was killed.
Israeli forces denied ordering the evacuation of the hospital, saying it had “acceded to the request of the director” to allow more civilians to leave.
The WHO said 29 patients with serious spinal injuries could not move without medical assistance; others had infected wounds because of a lack of antibiotics. There are also 32 babies in “extremely critical condition,” WHO said.
The siege on Gaza has left food, water, medicine and fuel in short supply, with just a trickle of aid allowed in from Egypt. Under US pressure, Israel permitted a first consignment of fuel to enter late on Friday, allowing telecommunications to resume after a two-day blackout. The UN said Israel had agreed to allow in 60,000 litres of fuel a day from Saturday, but said it was little more than a third of what was needed.
Israel told Palestinians to move south for their safety, but deadly strikes have continued there, including on a residential building where 26 people were killed on Saturday, said the director of Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis.
AFP