Israeli forces stormed the last operational hospital in the besieged northern Gaza on Friday after laying waste to a densely packed refugee camp in a bombing campaign that killed scores of Palestinians.
The attack on the Kamal Adwan hospital, located in Beit Lahia, was launched around 2am local time, shortly after Israeli fighter jets carpet-bombed residential buildings in the nearby Jabalia camp and southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
The assault on the hospital began with air strikes that hit the hospital and its courtyards, including the medical oxygen generator, said Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
The bombing of the oxygen supply led to the death of children in the hospital and wounded medical staff, Bursh said.
“Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks… which are shelling the [hospital] building,” Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, said in a video published on his social media pages shortly after the bombing. Contact with him has been lost since.
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“Where is the law? Which law in the world allows for a hospital to be directly targeted?” he said in the video.
A few hours after the air strikes, Israeli troops raided the hospital and called on all patients, including people in intensive care, to gather in the courtyard.
They assaulted everyone inside, the director of nursing at the hospital told Al Arabi TV.
They then separated men and women. All men have been detained and subjected to field interrogations, according to Al Jazeera.
‘Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks’
– Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital
“Hundreds of patients, medical staff and some displaced people from homes near the hospital, who sought shelter there from the continuous shelling, have been detained,” the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement.
“No food, medicines and medical supplies necessary to save the lives of the wounded and patients in the hospital have been supplied or provided.
“The situation inside the hospital is catastrophic in every sense of the word.”
According to the director of nursing, there were 150 patients and wounded people inside at the time of the raid, alongside 250 medical staff.
“What is happening in the hospital is a crime and genocide against the Palestinian people,” he said.
Kamal Adwan is one of three hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip that have been under a suffocating Israeli siege for three weeks.
They have received little to no aid, medicine, food and fuel since the blockade on the north began.
The other two, the Indonesian hospital and al-Awda hospital, have ceased operations in recent days due to the ongoing Israeli attacks.
Kamal Adwan remained operational at minimal capacity, offering life-saving services to newborn infants in neonatal intensive care units and other patients in ICUs.
The Israeli military launched a new offensive on north Gaza on 5 October, described by rights groups and experts as part of a plan to ethnically cleanse the area of Palestinians.
It began after a controversial proposal named the “Generals’ Plan” was presented to the Israeli government, which would see areas north of the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts Gaza in two, emptied of its residents so Israel could establish a “closed military zone”.
“Those who leave will receive food and water,” Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli military general and former head of the National Security Council, who is spearheading the proposal, said in a video posted about the plan last month.
According to the plan, anyone who chooses to stay would be considered a Hamas operative and could be killed.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, estimates that about 400,000 people remain in Gaza’s north, including Gaza City.
The besieged areas have remained under a debilitating blockade and media blackout since, with Israeli forces accused of exacerbating starvation and malnutrition as part of the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Jabalia carpet-bombing
Elsewhere, heavy Israeli aerial bombardment killed and wounded scores of people in attacks across the Gaza Strip late on Thursday and into Friday morning.
A block of residential homes in the Jabalia refugee camp was flattened on Thursday night, leaving 150 people “killed or wounded,” according to the Palestinian civil defence search-and-rescue service. Around 10 families sheltering inside the homes were “wiped out,” an Al Jazeera reporter said.
Another wave of air strikes on homes in Beit Lahia, located northwest of Jabalia, killed at least 25 people on Friday morning, according to Arabic media reports.
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In the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces committed several “massacres” against civilians southeast of Khan Younis in pre-dawn and morning attacks, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 38 people have been killed, mostly children and women, the ministry added. Many more have been wounded.
“We do not understand how the world allows itself to stand by and watch the most heinous genocide and the most widespread systematic operation to destroy the health system and kill and arrest patients and medical staff without moving a finger,” the ministry said.
The Israeli military has been accused of deliberately destroying Gaza’s health system through constant attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and doctors, including by air strikes, detentions and denial of medical equipment, since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Israeli forces previously raided the strip’s two largest hospitals, the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and Naser hospital in Khan Younis, destroying them in the process.
They have also killed more than 1,150 health workers and detained 300 since the war on Gaza began, according to the Palestinian health ministry.