Israeli forces withdraw after weeklong siege at Gaza Strip hospital
Israeli forces withdrew from the area around a hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday morning after destroying part of the building and interrogating its staff for a week, leaving behind rubble and bodies, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and two people at the scene.
For a week the Kamal Adwan
Hospital in Beit Lahia was surrounded and raided by Israeli occupation forces, who destroyed the southern part of the hospital, according to the health ministry.
The United Nations reported Thursday that Israeli troops, accompanied by tanks, had besieged the hospital for at least three days, periodically sending troops in on raids. There were also reports that Palestinians there were being subjected to mass arrests and ill-treatment, the United Nations said.
Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, a Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson, said in a statement that at one point during the siege, the hospital’s medical staff and patients were forced to evacuate the hospital’s remaining buildings and gather in courtyards in the cold winter weather.
Some of the hospital’s staff, including its director, Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot, were detained, the ministry said.
The withdrawal came as Gaza has been plunged into a near communication blackout for two days — at least the fifth such mass outage of phone and internet during the war — leaving more than 2 million Palestinians virtually cut off from the outside world and one another as Israel’s offensive continues.
This is the longest such outage so far in the war. Previous blackouts have been caused by Israeli attacks on telecommunication towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communication lines, or a shortage of fuel, according to Gaza authorities and communication companies.
On Thursday evening, Paltel, the main Palestinian telecommunications company, said on social media that “all telecom services in Gaza Strip have been lost due to the ongoing aggression. Gaza is blacked out again.”
Some cellular towers and underground fiber cables had been destroyed or damaged by Israeli airstrikes, said Abdulmajeed Melhem, the Paltel group’s CEO.
The Israeli military said it would not comment in response to questions about whether its strikes had caused the latest blackout.
During the Israeli siege at the hospital, 12 premature babies were trapped inside in their incubators without access to milk or life support, the health ministry said.
The Israeli military disputed the accounts. “Contrary to claims, Kamal Adwan Hospital was not attacked,” the Israeli military said in a statement in response to questions, adding that it “did not ask the hospital to evacuate.”
Israeli military attacks on hospitals and other medical facilities have drawn international condemnation and spurred concerns that the destruction of the enclave’s health infrastructure will lead to even more deaths from injuries and diseases.
“I’m extremely worried about reports of a raid at Kamal Adwan Hospital in #Gaza after several days of siege,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the UN’s World Health Organization, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Dec. 12.
“According to the Ministry of Health, there are 65 patients including several needing intensive care, and 45 medical staff in the hospital,” Tedros said in his post. “The hospital was already minimally functional due to acute shortages of fuel, water, food and medical supplies even before the siege.”
Reem al-Taluli, a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview that Israeli forces withdrew from Kamal Adwan Hospital early Saturday morning after besieging it for a week and striking most of its buildings. During that time, she and others holed up inside the hospital’s buildings and courtyard, went hungry and were interrogated by Israeli soldiers, she said.
The Israeli army gave them bottles of water, she said.
She said soldiers questioned her about Israeli hostages held by Hamas and demanded she give them her phone number and the names of her brothers.
The Israeli military detained several people from the hospital, she added.
“This is a big crime here inside Kamal Adwan Hospital,” a local journalist, Anas Al-Sharif, said in a video of the rubble at the scene that he posted on social media. “Dozens of bodies, the bulldozer rolled over them and left,” he said in the video.
As his camera panned across the rubble, flies could be seen buzzing above the upturned earth and rubble.