‘Entire families dead’

A journalist working for CNN said the scene at Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital yesterday "feels like a horror movie" after Israeli forces withdrew, ending their two-week siege of the facility.

"Bulldozers crushed bodies of people everywhere around and in the yard of the hospital," said Khader Al Za'anoun, a staffer with Wafa, the Palestinian news agency.

Al Za'anoun said people had arrived at the complex to search for missing family members.

"Many families are looking for their loved ones and cannot find them. Some of them even know they were killed but their bodies are missing," he said. "We found entire families dead and their bodies are decomposed in houses around the hospital."

Al Za'anoun said survivors at the complex were malnourished.

People who are alive inside the hospital are suffering from starvation…

"People who are alive inside the hospital are suffering from starvation as they were given one bottle of water a day to share for six people," he said. "I'm looking around me and I can't believe what I see."

In a statement confirming their withdrawal from the hospital, Israel's military said its troops had killed terrorists while preventing harm to civilians.

"Injured and dead bodies fill the hospital grounds," Captain Mahmoud Bassal said yesterday. "There are bodies buried in the hospital yards."

More than 30 wounded people were transported from Al-Shifa to the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital east of Gaza City, Bassal said.

Images from the area showed widespread destruction with charred and pockmarked buildings inside the complex.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Jerusalem on Sunday evening against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and against exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from military service, in scenes reminiscent of mass street protests last year.

Protest groups organised the rally outside parliament, the Knesset, calling for a new election to replace the government, reports Reuters.

Israel's N12 News said it appeared to be the largest demonstration since the offensive began. Haaretz and Ynet news sites said it drew tens of thousands of people.

Netanyahu's cabinet has faced widespread criticism over the security failure of the Hamas attack on southern Israel.

"This government is a complete and utter failure," said 74-year-old Nurit Robinson, at the rally. "They will lead us into the abyss."

Israel's offensive in the Palestinian enclave has aggravated a longstanding source of friction in society that is also unsettling Netanyahu's coalition government - exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students from service in the country's conscript military.

With a March 31 deadline looming for the government to come up with legislation to resolve a decades-long standoff over the issue, Netanyahu filed a last-minute application to the Supreme Court last week or a 30-day deferment.