The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Internet, phone service restored, U.N. renews critical aid deliveries.
Patients, staff and displaced people departed Gaza’s largest hospital Saturday, health officials said, leaving behind only Israeli forces and a skeleton crew to care for those too sick to move. The exodus came the day internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip, ending a telecommunications outage that forced the United Nations to shut down critical aid deliveries.
Dozens of people were killed in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp when what witnesses described as an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded U.N. shelter in the main combat zone of northern Gaza. Photos from a local hospital showed more than 20 bodies wrapped in bloodstained sheets.
The Israeli military, which had warned Jabaliya residents and others in a social media post in Arabic to leave, had no immediate comment on the strike and said only that its troops were active in the Jabaliya area “with the aim of hitting terrorists.”
The military rarely comments on individual strikes, saying only that it targets Hamas while trying to minimize harm to civilians.
“Receiving horrifying images & footage of scores of people killed and injured in another UNRWA school sheltering thousands of displaced in the north of the Gaza Strip.
“These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer,” Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said on X, formerly Twitter.
Attacks also continued in southern Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing
at least 26 Palestinians, according to a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken.
Israel’s military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny — and urging the several thousand people still there to leave.
On Saturday, the military said it had been asked by the hospital’s director to help those who would like to leave do so by a secure route.
The military said it did not order any evacuation, and that medical personnel were being allowed to remain in the hospital to support patients who cannot be moved.
But Medhat Abbas, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, said the military had ordered the facility cleared, giving the hospital an hour to get people out.
After it appeared the evacuation was mostly complete, Dr. Ahmed Mokhallalati, a Shifa physician, said on social media that 120 patients remained who were unable to leave, including some in intensive care and premature babies, and that he and five other doctors were staying to care for them.
It was not immediately clear where those who left the hospital had gone, with 25 of Gaza’s hospitals nonfunctional due to lack
of fuel, damage and other problems and the other 11 only partially operational, according to the World Health Organization.
Israel has said hospitals in northern Gaza were a key target of its ground offensive aimed at crushing Hamas, claiming they were used as militant command centers and weapons depots, which both Hamas and medical staff deny.
Israeli troops have encircled or entered several hospitals,
while others stopped functioning because of dwindling supplies and loss of electricity.
The war, now in its seventh week, was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 240 men, women and children.
Fifty-two Israeli soldiers have been killed since the Israeli offensive began, authorities said.
More than 11,500 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble.
The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, but more than two-thirds
of those killed were women and children, authorities said.
Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.