The two main hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip remain cut off and their operations have collapsed this Sunday, unable to admit admissions in the face of the advance of Israeli forces that are widely surrounding the capital of the Palestinian enclave in a war against Hamas militias. At Al Shifa health complex, the most important in the region, at least three premature babies have died and dozens are in danger due to power outages in the incubators, the center’s officials told Portal. The Al-Quds Center, the second largest hospital, also suspended its activities as supplies ran out.
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Israeli military spokesmen claim that the Islamist movement, which has de facto ruled Gaza since 2007, hides military command posts in a network of tunnels dug under hospitals. In a new turn of events that is challenging the international community, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, at the head of a future executive branch without Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which remains in place. According to the warning, it is under the exclusive control of Israeli security.
The few health centers still in operation, such as Al-Ahli Hospital in the capital of the Gaza Strip, can hardly care for patients. He Surgeon Fadel Naim He assured this Sunday via the X network (formerly Twitter) that the injured were arriving en masse at the center’s emergency room. “It is the only one that continues to accept admissions in the north of the Gaza Strip, but there are hundreds of wounded, exceeding our capacity,” he warned.
Al-Shifa Hospital was out of service after a three-day Israeli advance in its surroundings and suffered direct attacks from artillery and aircraft, which health authorities denounced. Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al Qifra told Portal that the center was in a “catastrophic situation, no one could enter or leave” and that Israeli gunfire overnight from Saturday to Sunday “affected medical personnel and civilians “terrorized”.
Israel denies opening fire on health facilities and attributes Thursday’s impact on a courtyard of the Al-Shifa complex, where civilians who had lost their homes in the war had sought refuge, to a stray rocket fired by Israel was fired by Islamist militias. The armed forces’ chief spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Israel had offered to evacuate the nearly 40 babies still in the neonatal unit while clearing a path for people to be evacuated to the south of the enclave. Israel also claims it tried to deliver fuel for the hospital’s power generators, but Hamas militants prevented it.
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No medicine or food
The director of Al Shifa Health Complex, Mohamed Abu Selmeyah, responded that he had not received this information from the Israeli army and that the necessary security conditions to organize an evacuation were not in place. The Palestinian Red Crescent, in turn, reported that the Al-Quds Hospital, also in the capital of Gaza, no longer had medicines and food to care for patients and therefore had to cease operations.
An official of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, quoted by France Presse, denounced this Sunday that there are patients on the streets of the capital who are “left without medical care” after the “forced evacuations” of the Rantisi and Al Naser children’s hospitals. “We have completely lost contact with the health workers in these two centers,” said Mohamed Zaqut, speaking on behalf of the health department of the Hamas-controlled government. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in another incident that has not yet been detailed, has assured that an Israeli bomb attack on its headquarters in Gaza City on Saturday evening caused “a significant number of deaths and injuries” among the hundreds of civilians who had sought refuge in the building.
Hostage negotiations suspended
Amid the chaos surrounding hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, a Hamas spokesman warned that due to the siege imposed on Al-Shifa Hospital along with other health centers, negotiations were underway for the release of the 240 hostages captured in Israel by its Militia members on October 7th. The same source denied that his organization was hiding in tunnels beneath the hospital facilities.
Qatari mediators continue to try to converge positions between Israel and Hamas toward a deal on the hostage crisis, which, as the Washington Post reports, could include the release of a hundred kidnapped people. These include Asian migrant workers, foreign visitors, Israelis with a second nationality, and women and children. In return, Israel should release a similar number of women, minors and elderly men held in Israeli prisons for so-called security crimes related to the Palestinian cause.
In an interview with American broadcaster NBC on Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu did not rule out an agreement to release “women, children and elderly men taken hostage.” The Israeli leader had announced the previous evening that Israel would retain control of the Strip’s security after defeating Hamas and that, in contrast, it did not expect the “current Palestinian Authority” to take over administration of the Palestinian coastal area US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently noted this during a visit to Israel.
“The United States does not want to see more exchanges of fire around the hospitals in the Gaza Strip, where patients and civilians are caught between two fires,” warned Jake Sullivan, security adviser, this Sunday at the White House National. “We are holding consultations with the Israel Defense Forces on this issue,” he said.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in turn, told CNN that he considered the attacks in the Gaza Strip to be a “collective punishment” that could not even be justified by the massacre of soldiers and civilians committed by Hamas. on October 7th in Israel. Guterres recalled that more than a hundred UN employees in the Gaza Strip had lost their lives as a result of Israeli attacks. Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy, reiterated that the bloc was “seriously concerned” about the “worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” In a statement, he assured that the EU would join “the calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the establishment of humanitarian corridors.” “We call on Israel to exercise maximum restraint to ensure the protection of civilians,” he added.
Nearly 200,000 Gazans have moved in the past three days from the south of the Gaza Strip through the corridor opened by Israel for at least four hours a day on the Saladin Highway, which crosses the enclave from one end to the other. According to the Palestinian Health Service, the so-called “humanitarian pauses” did not prevent at least ten people, including women and children, from losing their lives this Sunday in an Israeli bombing raid on an inhabited area near Khan Yunes in the south of the Palestinian territory .
At the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border, this Sunday, around 800 foreign citizens or Palestinians with dual nationality and at least seven injured Palestinians were able to leave the strip in a new day of evacuation after it remained closed for the last two days, according to Ivy. At least 53 trucks carrying humanitarian aid, 10% of the estimated daily needs, crossed the Egyptian customs terminal this Sunday towards the Palestinian coastal enclave.
After Hezbollah leader, Shiite cleric Hasan Nasrallah, warned against Israel on Saturday, 18 Israeli soldiers and civilians were injured by rocket fire from Lebanon near the Lebanese border. In the most serious incident, one person was admitted in critical condition after an anti-tank missile struck the vehicle in which he was traveling. Israel, which responded with intense artillery and air strikes on projectile launch points in the neighboring country’s south, also attacked military positions in Syria at dawn on Sunday after an attack was recorded in the Golan Heights, a Syrian plateau carried out by Israel since 1967 .
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