UPDATED 8:51 A.M.
GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Palestinian officials said a baby died and dozens more patients were at risk from an Israeli siege around Gaza’s largest hospital on Saturday, while Israel said it had killed a Hamas militant who had stopped another hospital from being evacuated.
Israel says doctors, patients and thousands of evacuees who have taken refuge at hospitals in northern Gaza must leave so it can tackle Hamas gunmen who it says have placed command centres under and around them.
Hamas denies using hospitals in this way. Medical staff say patients could die if they were moved and Palestinian officials say Israeli weapons fire makes it dangerous for others to leave.
“It’s totally a war zone, it’s a totally scary atmosphere here in the hospital,” Ahmed al-Mokhallalati, a senior plastic surgeon at Al Shifa hospital, told Reuters.
“It’s continuous bombardment for more than 24 hours now, nothing stopped, you know, it’s all from the tanks, from the street, from the airstrike.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported situation in Al Shifa hospital, where a Palestinian health ministry spokesman said Israeli shelling had killed a patient in intensive care.
Ashraf Al-Qidra, who represents the health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, said Israeli army snipers commandeering rooftops of buildings near the hospital fired into the medical complex from time to time, limiting the ability of medics and people to move.
“We are besieged inside the Al Shifa Medical Complex, and the (Israeli) occupation has targeted most of the buildings inside,” he said.
The hospital suspended operations after fuel ran out, Qidra said, adding: “As a result, one newborn baby died inside the incubator, where there are 45 babies.”
CLASHES ALL NIGHT
Residents said Israeli troops, who began a war to eliminate Hamas after it staged a bloody cross-border assault on Oct. 7, had been clashing with Hamas gunmen all night in and around Gaza City where the hospital is located.
“The hospitals need to be evacuated in order to deal with Hamas. We intend on dealing with Hamas who have turned hospitals into fortified positions,” the Israeli military said when asked if it planned to enter Gaza hospitals at some point.
Hamas denies using the hospital for its military purposes and has asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to send missions to Shifa to investigate the Israeli allegations.
Israel said earlier it had killed what it called a Hamas “terrorist” who it said had blocked the evacuation of another hospital in the north, which Palestinian officials have said is out of service and surrounded by tanks.
“(Ahmed) Siam held hostage approximately 1,000 Gazan residents at the Rantissi Hospital and prevented them from evacuating southwards for their safety,” an Israeli military statement said.
It said Siam was killed along with other militants while hiding in the “al Buraq” school. Palestinian officials told Reuters on Friday at least 25 Palestinians had been killed in an Israeli strike at the school, which was packed with evacuees.
The Palestinian Health Ministry, which is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank – separated from Gaza by Israel and run by a rival administration to Hamas – said separately that 39 babies were at risk at Shifa hospital.
Minister Mai Alkaila had initially said they had died because they could not get oxygen or medicine to them and electricity was cut off, but the ministry later corrected the information to say that one had died and 39 were at risk.
“Failure to bring fuel into the hospitals will be a death sentence for the rest. The incubators will only be able to work until this evening, after which the fuel will run out,” the ministry said.
‘AFRAID WE MIGHT LOSE THEM’
Contacted again about the ministry’s statement, Qidra reiterated that there was no electricity at the hospital and no internet.
“We are working hard to keep them alive, but we are afraid we may lose them in the coming hours,” he said, referring to the babies and other vulnerable patients. “There is no electricity in the hospital completely.”
On Friday, Gaza officials had said missiles landed in a courtyard of Al Shifa, killing one person and wounding others. Israel’s military said later that a misfired projectile launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza had hit Shifa.
Israel said on Saturday that rockets were still being fired from Gaza into southern Israel, where it has said about 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage by Hamas militants last month. It reduced the death toll by 200 on Friday.
Palestinian officials said on Friday 11,078 Gaza residents had been killed in air and artillery strikes since Oct. 7, around 40% of them children.
World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health workers the group was in contact with at Shifa had been forced to leave the hospital in search of safety.
“Many of the thousands sheltering at the hospital are forced to evacuate due to security risks, while many still remain there,” Tedros wrote on social media on Friday.
At another hospital, Al-Quds, medical teams worked on patients under torchlight in video footage released by the Palestinian Red Crescent. The hospital is one of four that Palestinian officials said on Friday had been blockaded by Israeli tanks.
Israel said on Saturday it had increased the number of places in which it said it would stop firing for several hours at a time so Gazans could move south and said many had done so.
“We have over the last three days seen a mass evacuation of at least 150,000 people,” a military spokesman said. “And we have seen more people evacuating today as the humanitarian pause in Jabalya area has been implemented.”
A U.S. official said a week ago that between 350,000 and 400,000 people remained in the north of Gaza.
Meeting in Saudi Arabia, Muslim and Arab countries called for an immediate end to military operations in Gaza, declaring at a joint Islamic-Arab summit that Israel bears responsibility for “crimes” against Palestinians.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Maytaal Angel; additional reporting by Crispian Balmer, Ari Rabinovitch, and other Reuters bureaux; Writing by Matt Spetalnick and Philippa Fletcher; editing by Grant McCool, Simon Cameron-Moore, William Maclean)
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GAZA (Reuters) -Israel faced mounting international pressure, including from its main ally the United States, to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza as the death toll rose and fighting intensified near hospitals.
The number of Palestinians killed during the bombardment of the coastal enclave in the past five weeks rose above 11,000, according to Gaza health officials, as Israeli forces waged war on Hamas militants who carried out the deadly Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel.
In his strongest comments to date on the plight of civilians caught in the cross-fire, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on a visit to India on Friday: “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.”
But Blinken reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel’s campaign to ensure that Gaza can no longer be used “as a platform for launching terrorism”.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a BBC interview published late on Friday, said Israel must stop bombing Gaza and killing civilians. France, he said, “clearly condemns” the “terrorist” actions of Hamas, but that while recognising Israel’s right to protect itself.
“We do urge them to stop this bombing,” Macron said.
In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said world leaders should be condemning Hamas, and not Israel. “These crimes that Hamas (is) committing today in Gaza will be committed tomorrow in Paris, New York and anywhere in the world,” Netanyahu said.
Israel has said that Hamas militants, who are holding as many as 240 hostages of different nationalities taken in last month’s attack, would exploit a truce to regroup if there were a ceasefire.
Saudi Arabia was set to host an extraordinary joint Islamic-Arab summit on Saturday. The Saudi foreign ministry said “countries feel the need to unify efforts and come out with a unified collective position”.
Before leaving Tehran to attend the summit in Riyadh, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said: “Gaza is not an arena for words. It should be for action.”
“Today, the unity of the Islamic countries is very important,” he added.
Iran backs both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group in Gaza, as well as Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon.
OVERCROWDED HOSPITALS HIT BY EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE
Fighting intensified overnight into Saturday near Gaza City’s overcrowded hospitals, which Palestinian officials said were hit by explosions and gunfire.
“Israel is now launching a war on Gaza City hospitals,” said Mohammad Abu Selmeyah, director of Al Shifa hospital.
He said later that at least 25 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Al-Buraq school in Gaza City, where people whose homes had been destroyed were sheltering.
Gaza officials said missiles landed in a courtyard of Al Shifa, the enclave’s biggest hospital, in the early hours of Friday, damaged the Indonesian Hospital and reportedly set fire to the Nasser Rantissi paediatric cancer hospital.
Israel’s military said later that a misfired projectile launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza had hit Shifa.
The hospitals, filled with displaced people as well as patients and medical staff, are in northern Gaza, where Israel says the Hamas militants are concentrated.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said the Hamas headquarters was in Shifa hospital’s basement, which meant the facility could lose its protected status and become a legitimate target.
Israel says Hamas hides weapons in tunnels under hospitals. Hamas denies that.
World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that health workers the group was in contact with at Shifa had been forced to leave the hospital in search of safety.
“Many of the thousands sheltering at the hospital are forced to evacuate due to security risks, while many still remain there,” Tedros wrote on social media.
‘NO ONE IS SAFE’
Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said Israel had bombed Shifa hospital buildings five times.
“One Palestinian was killed and several were wounded in the early morning attack,” he said by phone. Videos verified by Reuters showed scenes of panic and people covered in blood.
Israeli tanks have taken up positions around the Nasser Rantissi hospital as well as the Al-Quds hospital, medical staff said earlier.
The Palestinian Red Cross said Israeli forces were shooting at Al-Quds hospital, and there were violent clashes, with one person killed and 28 wounded, most of them children.
Israeli army spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht said at a briefing the army “does not fire on hospitals. If we see Hamas terrorists firing from hospitals we’ll do what we need to do. We’re aware of the sensitivity (of hospitals), but again, if we see Hamas terrorists, we’ll kill them.”
Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan said Israel had created a task force to establish hospitals in southern Gaza. On Oct. 12, Israel ordered some 1.1 million people in Gaza to move south ahead of its ground invasion.
Palestinian officials said on Friday that 11,078 Gaza residents had been killed in air and artillery strikes since Oct. 7.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said about 1,200 people had been killed, mostly civilians, in the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, a revision of an earlier death toll, although it added that might change again once all bodies were identified.
Israel has also said 39 soldiers have been killed in combat since Oct. 7.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; additional reporting by other Reuters bureaux; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; editing by Grant McCool & Simon Cameron-Moore)
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