After surrounding it for a week, the Israeli army began this Tuesday the evacuation of Al Naser, the main operating hospital in Gaza, in the city of Khan Younis. In images taken from the area, hundreds of people can be seen leaving in a group with their few belongings – some with white flags – after troops announced their determination to take over over loudspeakers and drones.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has expressed “concern” about the situation in Al Naser, which he described as the “backbone of the health system in the southern Gaza Strip,” where the vast majority of Gazans are based Forced resettlement from the north was concentrated. A message on the social network reported two incidents in the last four days.
The Israeli army emphasizes that it has “no intention to evacuate patients and medical personnel” and that it has opened a “safe route” for displaced people to the “humanitarian zone.” The spokesman for the Hamas government's health ministry in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qudra, has accused the forces of forcing “thousands of displaced people, families of medical staff and patients who cannot move” to leave the center, despite “of be at risk of extreme danger.”
Like any existing facility of a certain size, the hospital has become an improvised shelter for displaced people. An estimated thousands of people inside have spent the last few days in fear of the tanks and riflemen stationed nearby. At least three civilians were killed, according to health authorities in the Strip. The NGO Doctors Without Borders, which has employees there, reported at the end of January that around 300 patients remained in hospital and could not be evacuated due to a lack of ambulances and the associated danger. It is a similar situation to that in November at Al-Shifa Hospital in the capital, where Israel located a Hamas command and operations center that it had not found.
In the images broadcast by Al Jazeera television in recent days, a Palestinian with his hands tied enters the hospital to convince him of the need to evacuate, a body lying in the area and a Group of Palestinians passing canisters of water with a cart in fear of crossing the street leading to the hospital.
“Intense Bombing”
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The Palestinian Red Crescent also reported this Tuesday “intense shelling” in the area around another hospital in Khan Yunis, Al Amal, which was damaged. He had previously reported on the arrest of nine employees there and that soldiers had broken medical equipment and taken laptops during the raid.
The Israeli army believes that the medical centers hide access to the militants' underground tunnel network. In the network that the troops are blowing up or flooding with water from the Mediterranean, the Israeli forces hope to find some of the 134 hostages (at least 31 of them dead) still in Gaza after rescuing two of them this Tuesday You have dual Argentine and Israeli citizenship. Or Yahia Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, whose assassination — “He’s a dead man,” several Israeli leaders said after the massive Oct. 7 attack — would give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a symbolic “victory photo” after more than four months of the war.
This Monday, the Israeli Defense Forces released a video in which Sinwar appears. It is the first since the beginning of the war. It was taken in the early days and he is seen from behind, moving through a tunnel with his wife and children. On the same day, the head of Israeli intelligence met in Cairo with Qatari, Egyptian and American mediators to negotiate the exchange of hostages for the release of Palestinian prisoners and a ceasefire lasting at least six weeks. He won't be coming back for now.
This Tuesday, Netanyahu ordered the delegation to stay in Israel because he “did not receive any new proposal from Hamas” in Cairo compared to last week. Hamas then proposed negotiating a final end to the war during a 135-day ceasefire in which up to 1,500 Palestinian prisoners would regain their freedom in exchange for the gradual handover of all hostages. The Israeli Prime Minister firmly rejected this and again this Tuesday described it as “madness”. “A change in Hamas's positions will allow negotiations to move forward,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, daily clashes between Israel and militias in Lebanon escalated a notch this Tuesday. This morning, rocket fire from Lebanon killed one soldier and injured eight others at a military base. The attack is unusual not only because most of the projectiles appeared to have been aimed at uninhabited areas to avoid escalation, but also because it hit a military base in the city of Safed that was not evacuated and is 14 kilometers from the border. . No armed group has claimed responsibility for the attack. The Israeli army responded with a series of bombings, including fewer near the border, that killed at least four people: two children, a woman and a Hezbollah militant.
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