PATIENT KILLED IN GAZA HOSPITAL ATTACK
RAFAH, Gaza Strip: Israeli forces fired at the main hospital in southern Gaza early on Thursday, killing a patient and wounding six others.
Nasser Hospital, in the southern city of Khan Younis, has been the latest focus of operations that have gutted Gaza’s health sector as it struggles to treat scores of patients wounded in daily bombardments.
Medics said the army was looking to evacuate thousands of displaced people from the medical complex that has been largely cut off by fighting for weeks.
Israeli airstrikes, meanwhile, killed at least 13 people in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, 10 civilians — mostly women and children — and three fighters from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas.
The strikes came just hours after a rocket attack from Lebanon killed an Israeli soldier in what was the deadliest of daily exchanges of fire along the border since the October 7 start of the war in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue strikes until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages taken during the October 7 attack are returned.
Video of the aftermath of the strike showed medics scrambling to wheel patients on stretchers through a corridor filled with smoke or dust.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that it had opened a secure corridor for displaced people to leave the hospital but would allow doctors and patients to remain there.
Videos circulating online showed scores of people walking out of the facility on foot, carrying their belongings on their shoulders. The military had ordered the evacuation of Nasser Hospital and surrounding areas last month.
However, like other health facilities, medics said patients were unable to safely leave or be relocated, and thousands of people displaced by fighting elsewhere remained there.
The Gaza Health Ministry said last week that Israeli snipers were preventing people from entering or leaving the hospital.
Prior to Thursday’s strike, it said 10 people had been killed inside the complex over the past week.