According to several sources in the Ministry of Health of the Gaza Strip, where Hamas rules, thousands of people, including about 450 patients, displaced civilians and medical personnel, were forced to evacuate Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza by Israeli forces this Saturday. They did so, although Israel denies this, following orders over the military loudspeaker and advancing on foot while waving white cloths to be recognized by the troops, according to a Palestinian minister spokesman. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, they passed through a city that had been devastated after a month and a half of war that had killed at least 12,000 people in the Gaza Strip.
In addition, more than a hundred people have been killed in attacks by the Israeli army in both the south and north of the Gaza Strip in the last few hours, local authorities report. The latest attacks this Saturday targeted a United Nations school and a building, both in the Jabalia refugee camp, about four kilometers from Al Shifa Hospital.
Around fifty people died in the school, where numerous families had sought refuge. The other bombing killed up to 32 members of the same family, including 19 minors, according to the France Presse agency. UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) representative Philippe Lazzarini claims he received “horrific images of dozens of dead and injured people” at the agency’s school “where thousands of displaced people are housed.” pointed out on the social network (formerly Twitter). The same school in Al Fajura was hit by Israeli shells two weeks ago.
However, some workers and about 120 patients remain in the facilities of Al-Shifa Hospital, most of them injured people who cannot be transported on foot, on stretchers or in wheeled beds, the spokesman added. For its part, the Israeli army points out that it is a voluntary departure through a safe route, that staff and patients who wish to stay can do so and that the operation was organized at the request of the center’s management, according to the military spokesman Daniel Hagari.
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The hospital is expected to employ five healthcare workers, including the Palestinian-Irish plastic surgeon Ahmed el Mojallalati, as he himself explained in a message published in to evacuate the hospital. Many patients cannot leave the hospital because they are lying on intensive care beds or in baby incubators.”
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Mojallalati called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to protect both professionals and people still in the facilities, adding, lest there be any doubt, the date November 18 and the time November 11 :00 added Saturday.
The soldiers “forcibly” evacuated “all the displaced and wounded who could walk, as well as most of the medical staff” from Al Shifa Hospital. There were about 450 patients left (inside), and now we are about 5,000. “We walked along Al-Wahda Street towards Saladino Street,” said one of the statements given to the media by Medhat Abbas, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, in the morning. The Saladin Highway, which runs through Gaza, is the route used by the Israeli army to transport the local population from the north, where the center of the operation to end Hamas is taking place, to the south.
The army assures that it will distribute food, water and humanitarian aid to those still in Al-Shifa hospital facilities. On the other hand, he offered residents who wanted to leave from north to south via the Saladin Strait until four in the afternoon to do so, according to the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman, Avichay Adraee.
Several health authority officials in Gaza insist that Israel is conducting an evacuation that is not only not voluntary, but is reportedly being done at gunpoint, Al Jazeera reports. The Qatari network with teams stationed in the Gaza Strip supports this version with the statements of Omar Zaqut, hospital director; Munir al Bursh, director general of the Ministry of Health, and Adnan al Bursh, head of orthopedics at the hospital.
List of critical patients
Zaqut said Gaza authorities have handed over a list of the most vulnerable patients to the Red Cross so they can be evacuated to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing in the south. Some of the evacuees are in such a “critical condition that they may not survive the displacement,” Ismail al Thawabta, director general of the Gaza government’s media office, told the same media.
Al-Shifa hospital in the north of the strip is the largest in the Palestinian Mediterranean enclave and has been at the center of the war for weeks as Israel accuses Hamas of using the complex as a command center and has spent four days with soldiers there. Center to try to prove it. The fundamentalist militia denies using these and other hospital facilities as surgical centers.
Several patients have died because the Al-Shifa complex was unable to provide adequate care as there is no running water or electricity. These facilities, in a city in constant fighting, have housed several thousand residents living there as refugees, as well as hundreds of patients and people, since the first days of the war that began after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 accommodated workers.
Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, has accused Israel of blocking the entry into Gaza of fuel needed to distribute humanitarian aid in trucks. “After weeks of delays, the Israeli authorities have approved only half of the minimum daily requirement,” said a statement, referring to the person in charge.
The Palestinian Red Crescent has denounced that its emergency medical teams remain trapped in the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City (north of the Strip) due to “intense shelling and gunfire by Israeli soldiers.” Al Ahli is the only one of the 24 hospitals in the north of the enclave that, at least until two days ago, continued to operate, albeit at a minimal level, and continue to admit patients.
In addition to the Jabalia refugee camp next to Gaza City, Israel is also carrying out bombings in the south of the Gaza Strip, in the area closest to the border crossing with Egypt, where it has been trying to send the population for weeks. According to Palestinian health authorities, more than 30 people, including several minors, have been killed in airstrikes in the cities of Khan Younis and Deir al Balah in recent hours. Among those who lost their lives is Ahmed Bahar, 76, interim president of Gaza’s Legislative Council, a body controlled by the Islamist militia, who acknowledged his death in a statement.
Meanwhile, Israel still has two other war fronts open. On the one hand, the occupied West Bank, where a military invasion with air support resulted in five deaths in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. On the other hand, the border with Lebanon continues to be the scene of constant exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and the Shiite militia Hezbollah.
According to Israeli authorities, the war began on October 7 with the killing of about 1,200 people by Hamas militants on Israeli territory and the kidnapping of more than 200 people. The army responded immediately with a land, sea and air operation against Gaza, a stronghold of fundamentalist militias.
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