Israeli forces have raided Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, after besieging and shelling it for many days.
In a post on Telegram, Gazan health ministry Spokesman, Ashraf al-Qudra added that Israeli forces were gathering males – including the medical staff – in the hospital courtyard, who he feared may then be arrested.
“We call on the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross to act immediately to save the lives of those in the hospital,” he added.
He later made a post that the Israeli forces “asked the hospital administration and medical staff to hand over the hospital security personnel’s weapon.”
“This means that they want to justify the storming of the hospital with criminal behaviour and the fabrication of a new lie. We fear that this will be used as an excuse against the medical staff and the hospital.”
Ashraf al-Qudra
As the Israeli army continued its raid of the medical facility, Doctors Without Borders noted that the situation in Kamal Adwan Hospital is catastrophic.
“We are outraged by what’s going on,” Leo Cans, MSF head of mission for Palestine, told a news agency.
“It’s the same scenario as al-Shifa Hospital repeating in other hospitals again and again,” Cans said.
Cans added that MSF doctors and health practitioners across Gaza were operating in conditions comparable to World War I, which took place over a century ago.
“We are operating on the floor. Children are arriving with very bad injuries, and [surgeons] have to do multiple operations but there are no more beds,” he said.
Hospitals have been forced to discharge patients they would not normally have due to the lack of space. Cans estimated 60 percent of the wounds get infected, becoming potentially life-threatening.
“This is totally inhumane, it’s totally unacceptable,” he said.
WHO Pleads For Halt In Hospital Attacks
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) pleaded for Gaza’s southern hospitals to be spared from further bombardment.
WHO said that only 11, or less than a third, of Gaza’s hospitals remain partially functional and pleaded for them to remain intact.
“In just 66 days the health system has gone from 36 functional hospitals to 11 partially functional hospitals – one in the north and 10 in the south,” Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territories, told a UN press briefing by videolink from Gaza.
He added, “We cannot afford to lose any healthcare facilities or hospitals. We hope, we plead that this will not happen.”
Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, said that his organisation hoped and was told that once the war moved to southern Gaza, there would be a different, more precise, approach to the fighting.
“[But] what’s happened is the assault on southern Gaza has been no less than the north. It’s raging through Khan Younis at the moment, and it is threatening Rafah. The compression of the population is greater. We cannot be sure of any of our points of operation to be safe.”
Martin Griffiths
Griffiths added that UN aid workers were operating on a form of “humanitarian opportunism” in the Gaza Strip which is not the typical characteristic of a humanitarian operation, which includes a level of dependability and safety, both for aid workers and for the people they serve.
“Those conditions don’t exist in southern Gaza.”
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