According to the director, on Tuesday thousands of civilians were still stuck in Gaza City’s main hospital, at the center of fighting between Israel and Hamas, without water or electricity and where around 180 bodies were buried in a mass grave.
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Several thousand Palestinians, patients, staff and civilians displaced by the war that has raged since October 7 crowd the grounds of Al-Chifa Hospital, a vast complex that Israel says houses the Islamist movement’s infrastructure, which is buried in a network of tunnels.
“The situation is very serious, it is inhumane,” warned Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on X (formerly Twitter).
At least “179 bodies” were buried in a “collective grave” at the Al-Chifa hospital complex on Tuesday, the director told AFP, saying that among them were seven premature babies who died due to lack of electricity to stay alive.
“We were forced to bury them in a mass grave,” said Doctor Mohammed Abou Salmiya. “Bodies are strewn in the corridors of the hospital complex and there is no electricity supply to the morgue cold rooms,” he added.
At the hospital, a journalist working with AFP said the smell of rotting corpses was overwhelming.
Israeli tanks were massed at the gates of al-Khifa on Tuesday, while fighting and airstrikes continued throughout the night in surrounding areas, he added, although less intense than previous nights.
Since the October 7 attack on civilians by Hamas commandos, Israel has been carrying out relentless attacks on the Gaza Strip since October 7 and has been carrying out a ground operation since October 27 with the aim of “wiping out” the Islamist movement that dominates there. besieged Palestinian territory.
On the Israeli side, around 1,200 people were killed, the vast majority civilians, according to authorities, on the day of the attack, which took place on a scale and with unprecedented violence since Israel’s founding in 1948.
The Israeli army announced on Tuesday that 46 soldiers had been killed since the start of the war.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip killed a total of 11,240 people, mostly civilians, including 4,630 children.
The Israeli military estimates that around 240 people were taken hostage during the Hamas attack in the Gaza Strip. It announced on Tuesday the death of Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old soldier and Hamas hostage, a day after the Islamist movement released a photo depicting her as “killed by an Israeli bombing.”
Hamas accuses Israel of “postponing” talks on the possible release of dozens of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire through Qatar’s mediation.
Relatives of the hostages planned a march from Tel Aviv to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Tuesday to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to support their release.
On Monday, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said soldiers had found “signs” of Hamas’s hostage hold in a video filmed in a basement of Al Children’s Hospital in Rantissi, Gaza.
He showed images of a baby bottle and an article of clothing near a chair, as well as assault rifles, grenades and what he described as an “explosive belt.”
The Hamas government said on Monday that all hospitals in northern Gaza, where the fiercest fighting is concentrated, were “out of service” due to a lack of electricity and fuel.
US President Joe Biden called on Israel, whose main ally is the United States, to show restraint and said the Al Chifa hospital must be “protected”.
The UN continues to demand the delivery of fuel to Gaza, particularly for power generators in hospitals.
The area has been under a complete Israeli siege since October 9, depriving the population of water, electricity, food and medicine. But Israel refuses to allow fuel through, saying it could be used by Hamas for its military activities.
“We have no electricity, no food, no water in the hospital,” said al-Chifa, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders. “Without functioning ventilators, people will die in a few hours,” he added.
The Israeli army, which accuses the Islamist movement of using sick and displaced people as “human shields,” said it did not target the hospital. She reported “efforts” to move incubators from an Israeli hospital to al-Chifa.
“The idea is to try to evacuate people, as many as possible,” army spokesman Peter Lerner said Monday evening.
According to him, “several hundred” people were in the hospital, while around 20,000 displaced people found refuge, according to the Hamas government’s deputy health minister, Youssef Abou Rich, who was present at the hospital.
On Tuesday, the Hamas government claimed that “more than a hundred” people had been killed in Israeli bombings since the previous day, of which, according to this source, 30 people died in the Indonesian hospital in Jabaliya, a huge refugee camp from the northern Gaza Strip.
Hamas has “lost control of Gaza” and its fighters are “fleeing towards the south” of the territory, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday. According to the United Nations, about 1.6 of the territory’s 2.4 million residents have been displaced by the war.
In recent days, tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled south from the rubble-turned northern Gaza Strip after Israel opened evacuation corridors.
In the south of the territory, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are huddled near the border with Egypt in catastrophic humanitarian conditions.
International aid from Egypt is arriving slowly, but in very insufficient quantities, according to the United Nations.
There were new exchanges of fire on the border between Israel and Lebanon on Monday night between the Israeli army and armed groups in Lebanon, including the powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah, which supports Hamas.
In the West Bank, five Palestinians were killed in nighttime clashes with Israeli forces in the Tulkarem sector, in the north of this Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory since 1967, which has been plagued by a rise in violence on the fringes of the war in Gaza, according to a hospital source.