About 8,000 people were evacuated from the fighting-hit Al-Amal hospital in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday, but about 300 more were still there, including the elderly, the Red Cross said on Tuesday.
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“The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is beyond catastrophic,” said a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Tommaso Della Longa, during a briefing at the press office in Geneva.
“8,000 displaced people who had taken refuge in our Palestinian Red Crescent Hospital in Khan Younes, Al-Amal, left the hospital yesterday (Monday, editor's note),” he said.
He then told AFP that the decision to evacuate was made “due to a lack of security.”
“There are currently around 100 elderly and disabled people who have not been able to leave the hospital, 80 patients and 100 staff and volunteers. They are still inside,” he said during the press conference.
The Gaza Strip is besieged and devastated after a four-month war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas. This conflict was sparked by the Islamist movement's unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, which killed more than 1,160 people, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
According to Israel, around 250 people were kidnapped on October 7th and 132 hostages are still being held in Gaza, almost 30 of whom are believed to have died.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, Israel's response in Gaza has left 27,585 dead, the vast majority of them civilians.
Khan Younes, the capital in the south of this Palestinian territory where Israel says leaders of the Islamist movement live, has largely been reduced to rubble.
For more than two weeks, Mr. Della Longa explained, Al-Amal Hospital there has been surrounded by fierce fighting and has even been “hit several times,” including last Friday, which killed the person in charge of the Palestinian Red Crescent Volunteer Department.
Al-Amal Hospital is one of the most important in the city, along with Nasser Hospital, which is also affected by the fighting.
“The Israeli occupation is intensifying its siege of the Nasser medical complex and is increasingly targeting its surrounding areas,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the Hamas Ministry of Health.
According to him, 300 medical personnel, 450 injured and 10,000 displaced people are in Nasser Hospital, where there is a shortage of food as well as medicines, especially anesthetics and surgical drugs.
In addition, the generators there would have to be switched off “within four days due to a lack of fuel”.