Outcry grows as ‘situation dire’ in Gaza hospitals
Major hospitals remained cut off yesterday as Israel pressed on with its offensive in north Gaza where doctors said thousands of Palestinians were trapped in dire conditions.
Al Shifa and other hospitals in north Gaza, now the focus of Israel's month-old war, were barely able to care for patients, medical staff said.
More people are getting killed and wounded daily by Israeli bombardment campaign but there are fewer and fewer places for the injured to go.
Speaking from inside Al Shifa, Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qidra said Israeli fire was "terrorising medical officials and civilians alike".
The director general of hospitals in Gaza yesterday warned that the lives of hundreds of patients were at risk because of the catastrophic situation at al-Shifa Hospital.
Palestinian Minister of Health Mai al-Kaila said Israeli forces "are not evacuating people from hospitals; instead, they are forcibly evicting the wounded onto the streets, leaving them to face inevitable death".
Israel's chief military spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said on Saturday that Israel's military would help evacuate babies from the hospital at the request of staff there.
Al-Qidra said that of 45 babies in total, three had already died and that they had not been told how to get the babies to safety.
A plastic surgeon in the hospital said the bombing of the building housing incubators had forced them to line up premature babies on ordinary beds, using the little power available to turn the air conditioning to warm.
In the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya also in north Gaza, Mosab Subeih, a baby boy, had been rushed in from a house struck by an Israeli missile.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said medical staff at the second largest hospital in northern Gaza, Al-Quds, were struggling to care for those there with little medicine, food and water.
Shifa was also out of reach for the newly wounded, said Mohammad Qandil, a doctor at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in south Gaza, who is in touch with colleagues there.
The World Health Organisation said it had lost contact with the hospital and was worried about people trapped there.
Israel has said doctors, patients and thousands of evacuees who have taken refuge at hospitals in north Gaza must leave so it can destroy what it says are Hamas command centres under and around them. Hamas denies using hospitals this way.
Yesterday, Israel said people could safely evacuate from three hospitals in northern Gaza, including Shifa via one of its exits. Hospital director Mohammad Abu Selmeyah told Al Arabiya television that there was no safe passage out.
With the humanitarian situation across Gaza worsening, 80 foreigners and several injured Palestinians crossed into Egypt in the first evacuations since Friday, four Egyptian security sources said.
At least 80 aid trucks had also moved from Egypt into Gaza by yesterday afternoon, two of the sources said. Jordan said earlier it had air-dropped a second batch into a field hospital.
Palestinian officials said on Friday that 11,078 Gaza residents had been killed in air and artillery strikes since then, around 40 percent of them children.
At least 45 percent of Gaza's housing units have been damaged or destroyed.
Disease is spreading among evacuees packed into schools and other shelters and surviving on tiny amounts of food and water, international aid agencies say.
Palestinian health officials said 13 people had been killed in an Israeli air strike on a house in Khan Younis in southern Gaza yesterday.
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