The director of one of northern Gaza’s last functioning health centres and the territory’s civil defence agency said Israel conducted several strikes on Friday that hit the Kamal Adwan hospital.
“There was a series of air strikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital, accompanied by intense and direct fire,” said hospital director Hossam Abu Safieh, adding that four staff were killed.
The Israeli army has not yet responded to AFP requests for comment on the strikes.
Mahmud Bassal, Gaza’s civil defence spokesman, told AFP that the Israeli army entered Kamal Adwan hospital, evacuated patients and arrested several Palestinians.
Abu Safieh said that following the latest raid, no surgeons were left at the facility.
The city of Beit Lahia, where the hospital is located, has been the site of an intense Israeli military operation for the past two months that has again escalated in recent days, forcing thousands to flee amid bombing, the civil defence agency said.
Israeli forces have stormed Kamal Adwan on several occasions since the start of the war nearly 14 months ago. The hospital said that its intensive care unit director Ahmad al-Kahlut was killed in an air strike late last month.
The latest strikes came just days after the UN’s World Health Organization said an emergency medical team had reached the hospital for the first time in 60 days.
Dr Faradina Sulistiyani, a surgeon on the team, told AFP from Gaza City that all seven of her team members left the premises on foot as the bombing went on.
‘Panic’
Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian territories, told reporters from Geneva he had “extremely concerning information” from Kamal Adwan.
He said the Israeli army was first spotted outside the hospital at 4:00 am (0200 GMT).
He said that the international medical team said that “panic caused by the bombing and shelling, along with the panicked crowd inside the hospital” caused Gazans and the team to leave the hospital despite there being “no official evacuation order”.
Peeperkorn said that a “substantial amount” of people including patients and staff remained in the hospital, which is still “minimum operational”.
With little to no aid reaching Kamal Adwan since the start of the Israeli operation in Gaza’s besieged north in early October, the hospital had run out of most supplies, including fuel.
The Israeli army says its operation in the far north aims to keep Hamas militants from regrouping there.
Rights groups have accused it of pursuing a plan to evacuate or starve all those remaining there, which Israel denies.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said on Thursday that displaced Palestinians would not be allowed to move back to Gaza’s north as long as the military operations are ongoing.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s surprise October 7, 2023 attack which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has resulted in at least 44,612 deaths, mostly civilians, according to data from the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.
