The Israeli army confirmed on Friday that it had attacked an ambulance at the entrance to Gaza City’s largest hospital to ensure it was “used by a Hamas terrorist cell” it has been fighting since October 7 in the small Palestinian hospital Territory is at war.
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The Hamas government reported “dozens of dead and injured” around this facility where thousands of displaced people sought refuge, while an AFP correspondent saw several bodies and injured people next to an ambulance damaged after that attack on Friday.
AFPTV images also show civilians carrying wounded with bloody bodies. Others lie on the ground and are visibly thrown against cars parked on the side of the road by the blast wave.
World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “deeply shocked.”
“We will say it again: patients, caregivers, facilities and ambulances must be protected at all times. Always,” he wrote again on X, formerly Twitter.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lynn Hastings, said she was “concerned” because the attack targeted “patients who should be brought to safety.”
According to the head of the Hamas government’s press service, the attack targeted “an ambulance convoy that was preparing to transport wounded people from Al-Shifa hospital toward the border with Egypt,” where dozens of injured Palestinians had been hospitalized for several days hospital.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, 16 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are currently out of service, either because they were bombed or because they have run out of fuel to run their generators.
According to the WHO, al-Shifa currently has a bed occupancy rate of 164%.
Since the war began on October 7 with Hamas’s bloody attack on Israeli soil, which authorities say killed more than 1,400 people, incessant Israeli bombings have left more than 9,200 dead and 23,500 injured. in the Gaza Strip Hamas Health Ministry.
On October 27, the Israeli army accused Hamas of “waging war from hospitals” in the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist movement categorically denied.