GAZA/JERUSALEM, (Reuters) – Israeli tanks took up positions at the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital today, 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.”
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Monday that Shifa hospital must be protected and that he hoped there would be less intrusive action there.
Israel launched its campaign last month to annihilate Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, after Hamas gunmen rampaged through southern Israel killing civilians. Around 1,200 people died and 240 were dragged to Gaza as hostages according to Israel’s tally.
Since then thousands of Gazans have been killed and two thirds of the population made homeless by a relentless Israeli military campaign. 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% of them children.
Fighting also took place on Monday 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.
In a sign of Israel’s advance in Gaza, the country’s Channel 12 TV broadcast a photo of soldiers carrying Israeli flags in the Gaza parliament chamber. Israeli security cabinet minister Israel Katz said on X social media that the picture showed “the symbol of Hamas rule in Gaza” was in the hands of Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s military and security service said they had killed a number of Hamas commanders and officials in the last day, including Mohammed Khamis Dababash, who they said was the group’s former head of military intelligence.
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 waschecking the report on Jabalia.
In Israel, sirens sounded across the centre of the country and in the city of Tel Aviv on Monday 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 United States launching airstrikes on Iran-linked militia targets in neighbouring Syria.
HOSPITAL AT HEART OF BATTLES
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.”
U.N. agency UNRWA is now housing around 800,000 people in Gaza, or half of those made homeless by the fighting. It said on Monday 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.
The conflict has polarised the world, with many countries saying that even the shocking brutality of the Hamas attacks did not justify an Israeli response that has killed so many civilians.
Israel says it must destroy Hamas, and the blame for harm to civilians falls on fighters hiding among them. It has rejected demands for a ceasefire, which it says would only prolong the suffering by letting Hamas regroup. Washington backs that position though it says it is pressing its ally to protect civilians.
The conflict has raised fears of a broader conflict.
Weeks of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which like Hamas is backed by Iran, have escalated.
Israeli strikes killed two people in south Lebanon on Monday, according to a first-responder organisation affiliated to the Hezbollah-allied Amal Movement.
On the Israeli side, a Hezbollah missile attack on Sunday wounded several workers from the Israel Electric Company with one later dying of his wounds, the firm said.
U.S. and international forces based in northeastern Syria were targeted at least four times in less than 24 hours with drones and rockets, a U.S. military official said on Monday, adding there had been no casualties.
