Israeli airstrikes and intense gunfire on the ground around one of the last working hospitals in northern Gaza killed or wounded scores of people early Friday, the hospital’s director said, as Israeli forces ordered the building evacuated.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, in a statement described “a series of airstrikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital,” which did not hurt anyone in the hospital, but were followed by “heavy and direct gunfire.” When dawn broke, he said, bodies were “in the streets, surrounding the hospital,” and four medical staff members were among the dead.
“The situation inside and around the hospital is catastrophic,” said Dr. Safiya, whose statement was released by Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the enclave’s prewar government controlled by Hamas, the militant group that is at war with Israel.
“Medical supplies are nearly depleted, and there are hundreds of victims,” he added, a figure that could not be independently verified.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The details remain murky, but Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s chief representative for the Palestinian territories, said there was “intense bombing close to the building and an attack by Israeli forces who ordered everyone to leave,” sparking panic that apparently added to the casualties.
The hospital did not receive the kind of official evacuation order that sometimes precedes airstrikes, he said, before Israeli forces entered around 4 a.m. and told people to leave.
Briefing reporters in Geneva in a video call from central Gaza, Dr. Peeperkorn said that some people tried to flee the hospital by climbing over a back wall on the grounds, panicked by the intense fighting and the order to leave. That reportedly attracted gunfire from Israeli troops, he said, resulting in casualties.
Located in a densely populated city just north of Gaza City, Kamal Adwan is one of the few hospitals in northern Gaza still providing limited medical care. The Israeli military has accused Hamas of using the hospital as a base, which Gaza officials have denied, and has raided it repeatedly during the 14-month-old war.
In October, Israel’s military detained or expelled most of the staff members. Few doctors and nurses remain, and they care sometimes for upward of 100 patients. Local residents were also taking shelter at the hospital.
After Israeli forces ordered the hospital’s patients, staff and people sheltering there to leave, “they forcibly moved everyone to a checkpoint and later demanded one companion for each patient or displaced person to assist with the evacuation,” Dr. Safiya said in the statement.
“In the morning, we were shocked to see hundreds of bodies and injured individuals in the streets surrounding the hospital,” he added in the statement.
It was not clear how many of the dead and wounded were fighters or noncombatants; the Gazan authorities do not distinguish between them in reporting casualties.
Dr. Safiya said the attack also hit oxygen generators at Kamal Adwan and left the hospital with only two inexperienced surgeons who had to start operating on about 20 critically injured patients.
A team of surgeons from Indonesia was among the first to be forced to leave the building, he said.
Dr. Peeperkorn called it “incomprehensible but also incredibly sad” that the six-person emergency medical team from Indonesia had been working at Kamal Adwan for less than a week, after Israel had denied them entry to Gaza several times.
The attack on Friday followed days of intense Israeli military operations that the Gazan health authorities reported had resulted in the death of the head nurse in the intensive care unit and damage to hospital facilities.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said a quadcopter drone shot at the hospital eight times on Thursday. A 16-year-old patient at Kamal Adwan was killed on Thursday while being taken by wheelchair to the hospital’s X-ray department, and 12 other people were wounded, the ministry said.
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