Witnesses tell of fear, deprivation at Gaza hospital
A week after start of Israel’s raid, toll mounts at Shifa
Seven days after Israel’s military began a raid on the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, Shifa, a picture of the sustained assault on the complex and its neighborhood emerges in fragments.
Neighbors described a relentless soundtrack of gunshots, airstrikes, and explosions. A surgeon spoke of doctors and patients corralled in the emergency ward while Israeli forces took control of the complex outside. A Palestinian teenager who spent four days sheltering in the hospital described the bodies she saw outside the entrance.
“They had put the bodies on the side and thrown blankets over them,” said Alaa Abu AlKaaf, 18, who said she and her family were at Shifa for days before leaving Thursday. It was not immediately clear when or how the bodies were taken there.
Interviews with other witnesses in the hospital, residents in or near the facility, and Gaza authorities in recent days, as well as with others who have left the complex over the past week, described a situation of fear and deprivation, interrogations and detentions of Palestinian men by Israeli forces, and a persistent lack of food and water.
The assault on Shifa, one of Israel’s longest hospital raids of the war in Gaza, began last Monday with tanks, bulldozers, and airstrikes. The military said it was aimed at senior officials of Hamas, the armed group that led an attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel began a war on Gaza in response.
In recent weeks, mediators have redoubled efforts to reach a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, hosting indirect talks between the two parties in Doha. Qatar, a key mediator, has voiced cautious optimism but says the talks have yet to see a breakthrough. Israeli leaders have said that regardless of whether a cease-fire deal is reached, they intend to start a ground operation in the southern city of Rafah to root out Hamas’s remaining forces there.
The raid on Shifa has focused international attention on the dire situation faced by hospitals and the patients sheltering there, according to local authorities. Many of the 30,000 Palestinians who the Gaza Health Ministry said had been sheltering at Shifa were displaced once again by the raid.
Gaza authorities said that at least 13 patients had died as a result of the raid because they were deprived of medicine and treatment or when their ventilators stopped working after the Israelis cut the electricity. Those claims could not be verified.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted a report on social media on Friday from a doctor in Shifa. Two patients on life support died because of a lack of electricity, and there were no medicines or basic supplies, he wrote. Many patients in critical condition were lying on the floor.
In one building, 50 medical workers and more than 140 patients have been kept since the second day of the raid, with extremely limited food, water, and one nonfunctional toilet, Tedros wrote.
“These conditions are utterly inhumane,” Tedros wrote.