Heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas trapped thousands of people in Gaza’s hospitals on Sunday, as medics and aid workers warned patients will die in the crippled facilities unless there is a pause in the battle.

Bright flares lit up the night sky over Gaza City and blasts echoed across the city as Israel’s air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas brought the fight to key medical installations.

“If we do not stop this bloodshed immediately with a ceasefire or at the bare minimum a medical evacuation of patients, these hospitals will become a morgue,” medical aid group Doctors Without Borders warned early Sunday.

Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the biggest in the territory, is “totally surrounded and bombardments are going on nearby,” the hospital’s director, Mohammad Abu Salmiya, said in a statement late on Saturday.

“The medical team cannot work and the bodies, in their dozens, cannot be managed or buried,” he said.

Inside the hospital, Doctors Without Borders surgeon Mohammed Obeid said there was no water, power, food or internet for about 600 post-operative patients, 37 to 40 babies and 17 people in intensive care.

Countless other people are seeking refuge in the hospital grounds.

Two babies died in the Al-Shifa neonatal unit after power to their incubators was cut off, and a man also died when his ventilator shut down, the surgeon said in an audio message posted on social media.

“We can see actually the smoke around the hospital. They hit everything around the hospital, and they hit the hospital many times,” he said.

A sniper had shot four patients within the hospital, he said, with one man hit in the neck and another in the abdomen. People trying to leave the grounds to seek safety further south in Gaza had faced bombardments, the surgeon said.

Grave concern

The United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) expressed alarm at the situation in Al-Shifa.

“WHO is gravely concerned about the safety of health workers, hundreds of sick and injured patients, including babies on life support, and displaced people who remain inside the hospital,” director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

The Israeli military has denied strikes or a siege at Al-Shifa hospital, and has repeatedly accused Hamas of using medical facilities as command centers and hideouts.

Hamas has denied the accusations.

The Israeli army also said it would “provide the assistance needed” to help “babies in the pediatric department to get to a safer hospital” on Sunday, at the request of Al-Shifa staff.

Twenty of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “no longer functioning,” according to the UN’s humanitarian agency.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society also called on the international community and humanitarian groups to intervene “immediately and urgently” to protect people in Al-Quds Hospital, also in Gaza City.

Artillery shelling nearby was “causing the building to shake,” the Red Crescent said Saturday, reporting “intense shooting at the hospital” where there were about 500 patients and more than 14,000 people seeking shelter.

Infants were facing dehydration because of a lack of breast milk alternatives, it said.

Other hospitals crippled by the fighting include the Indonesian hospital in north Gaza, where the director, Atef Al-Kahlot, said lack of fuel forced the facility to cut power to their desalination plant, medical scanners and lifts.

“The hospital is working with 30-40 percent of its capacity,” Al-Kahlot said.

The intense fighting has accelerated an exodus of people toward Gaza’s south.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians are fleeing southwards each day through an evacuation corridor opened by the Israeli military on Friday, according to the UN’s humanitarian affairs organization.

In all, the Israeli army said Saturday that in the last three days, around 200,000 Palestinians had left southwards from the area of the northern Gaza Strip where fighting is heaviest.

However, strikes were also hitting buildings at the southern end of Gaza in Rafah, the area of the densely populated territory to which civilians have been urged to evacuate.

Source – AFP
--Agencies