Aid groups sounding alarm for patients at embattled hospitals
The Israeli military said on Thursday it was carrying out raids in and around two hospitals in Gaza, as the United Nations and aid groups expressed alarm for patients and medical workers there and warned of the rapidly deteriorating state of Gaza’s health care system.
Fierce battles have been raging in and around Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the strip, since an Israeli assault there began 10 days ago.
The renewed fighting around the hospital, which Israel first raided in November, underscores the problems Israel has had in maintaining control of parts of Gaza its forces have supposedly captured.
The Israeli military said in a statement that nearly 200 people whom it called “terrorists” had been killed in the area and that its troops had taken fire from militants inside and outside one of the hospital’s buildings. Gazan authorities said that over the course of the raid, more than 200 civilians had been killed and another 1,000 had been detained. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Israel maintains that Hamas, the armed group that led an attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7, is using hospitals in Gaza for military purposes, a claim that Hamas and hospital administrators have denied.
Witnesses have described days of fear as fighting has continued at the Al-Shifa complex, with several patients dying as a result of the assault.
“We are constantly hearing strikes and gunfire day and night and seeing smoke rising from buildings,” said Ezzeldine al-Dali, who lives less than a mile from Al-Shifa. He said that several homes in the area were set on fire by Israeli forces after their occupants evacuated. That claim could not be independently verified.
“The scale of destruction around us is indescribable,” said al-Dali, 22, in a voice message Thursday. “The homes that have not been reduced to rubble have been burned,” he added.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said on Thursday that Gaza’s health system was “barely surviving.” He called for “an immediate end to attacks on hospitals” and for the protection of medical staff, patients and civilians. Israel initially raided Al-Shifa Hospital in November, and struggled to prove its early claim that Hamas maintained a command and control center beneath the site. Evidence examined by The New York Times suggests Hamas has used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex.
The fact that the Israeli military’s operation at the hospital and in the neighborhood has lasted longer than its previous raid there in November suggests that Hamas and allied groups have returned and have built up a significant force there, perhaps in recent weeks, military analysts say.
That in turn suggests that Israel’s strategy in north Gaza involves repeated raids in places where Hamas or other groups have reasserted themselves after Israeli forces have tried to clear them, according to military analysts.
But the problems Israel has faced in securing the hospital and its vicinity also raise the question of how easily Israel’s military could eliminate the threat from Hamas without a long term-presence in Gaza or an alternative governing structure in the territory.
At least six Palestinian militias have participated in recent attacks targeting Israeli forces in and around Al-Shifa, and there have been more than 70 such attacks since the raid began on March 18.