Kamal Adwan Hospital risks halting operations if Israel’s attacks continue [Getty/file photo]
The Israeli army has reportedly ordered the evacuation of Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, its director Hussam Abu Safiya said, adding that the military instructed patients and injured people to move toward another hospital in the area.
Abu Safiya said the mission was “next to impossible” because staff did not have ambulances to move the patients.
Israeli forces targeted the hospital’s generators with gunfire and artillery shelling, destroying one completely and causing damage to the hospital that has been subject to several attacks in recent days.
The army is also targeting fuel tanks, which could lead to a disaster for the workers and everyone inside the hospital if they explode.
The army also deliberately set ablaze a number of homes surrounding the hospital, as well as dropping bombs, further plunging the area in danger.
“The situation remains extremely dangerous. We have made appeals to the international community, but unfortunately, no one has intervened to stop the occupation from attacking our healthcare system in such a brutal and indiscriminate manner,” Abu Safiya said.
“Our medical staff and the hospital itself have been targeted, as if we were a military installation.”
The Israeli army has launched a deadly offensive and siege in the two towns of north Gaza, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, as well as the nearby Jabalia camp for nearly three months, under the army’s so-called ‘General’s Plan’, which seeks to ethnically cleanse the are in a bid to rid of its Palestinian residents.
Palestinians also have accused Israel of carrying out the atrocities to depopulate those areas to create a buffer zone.
Israel’s attacks on the Kamal Adwan Hospital has raised fears that the largest healthcare facility in northern Gaza would be forced to cease its operations, leaving scores of Palestinians without care.
Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 19 Palestinians, eight of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said, as of Sunday morning.
Palestinian medics said eight people, including children, were killed in the Musa Bin Nusayr School that sheltered displaced families in Gaza City.
At least 28 have been killed overnight, including the death toll from Sunday so far.
Also in Gaza City, medics said four Palestinians were killed when an airstrike hit a car.
At least five other Palestinians were killed in two separate airstrikes in Rafah and Khan Younis south of the enclave.
Israel’s military onslaught in the Gaza Strip, ongoing since October 7, 2023, have killed at least 45,259 Palestinians, with experts, UN agencies and several world leaders condemning Israel’s atrocities as genocide.