Israeli air strikes kill 32 in south Gaza amid calls for civilians to flee

Al Shifa patients and staff were forced to leave the hospital after an unspecified threat from the Israeli military

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza/JERUSALEM: Israeli air strikes on residential blocks in south Gaza killed at least 32 Palestinians on Saturday, medics said, after Israel again warned civilians to relocate as it girds for an assault on Hamas in the enclave’s south after subduing the north.

Such an offensive could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli storming of Gaza City to move again, along with residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, compounding a dire humanitarian crisis.

Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip after its Oct. 7 rampage into Israel in which its fighters killed 1,200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City – the enclave’s urban core – to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the northern half of the narrow strip and displaced around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. Many of those who have fled fear their homelessness could become permanent.

Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000, including 5,000 children. The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they are now updated infrequently due to the difficulty of collecting information.

Overnight on Saturday, 26 Palestinians were killed and 23 wounded by an air strike on two apartments in a multi-storey block in a busy residential district of Khan Younis, according to health officials.

An Israeli military statement on Saturday made no mention of air strike locations. It said only that over the past 24 hours its air force hit dozens of Gaza targets including militants, command centres, rocket launch sites and munitions factories.

A senior aide to Israel’s prime minister urged Palestinian civilians on Friday to relocate away from Khan Younis as Israeli forces would have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters dug into underground tunnels and bunkers – suggesting an Israeli ground offensive into the south was imminent.

Palestinian officials and Israel’s military gave conflicting accounts on Saturday about evacuations of medical staff, patients and displaced people from north Gaza’s largest hospital, taken over by Israeli forces earlier in the week.

Israeli soldiers force patients, staff to leave Al Shifa hospital

Israeli soldiers have forced people, mostly patients and medical staff, inside Al Shifa Hospital to leave and take Al Wehda Street to start their journey to the south.

About 5,000 people, or half of the occupants, have left the hospital and have so far walked for about 2km, media reports cited the director general of the Health Ministry as saying.

A video shows doctors and patients have now started to exit the hospital, leaving behind immobile patients.

About 150 patients are still inside the hospital because they are in no position to make the journey.

Much to international alarm, Israel made Al Shifa a primary target of its ground advance with its military saying it sits above a vast Hamas bunker. Hamas and Al Shifa staff deny this, saying Israel has proven no such thing as it continues to comb the premises and excavate areas in search of evidence.

Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila said all except about 125 of an estimated 1,000-1,500 war-wounded or sick patients, as well as 34 newborn babies along with just five doctors and some nurses, had been forced to leave Al Shifa by the Israeli military.

The Israeli army denied the Palestinian accounts. In a statement, it said its forces at Al Shifa had acceded to a request from the hospital’s director to “expand and assist” in further voluntary evacuations via a “secure route”. Doctors and medics could stay to support patients too weak to be evacuated, it said.

It released a video on Friday that it said showed a tunnel entrance in an outdoor area of the hospital. A bulldozer appeared in the background.

With the war entering its seventh week, there was no sign of a let-up, despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least “humanitarian pauses” to tackle critical shortages of food, medicines, drinking water and fuel afflicting civilians.

‘Dead bodies everywhere’: Doctor who fled Al Shifa tells of horrors

A doctor forced to leave Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital spoke of bodies in the streets and the stench of death in the air after a week-long siege that led to the care facility’s closure.

The final occupants of the strip’s largest hospital were given one hour by the Israeli military to leave the building on Saturday afternoon, or face an unspecified threat.

“The situation there is miserable,” media reports cited Dr Ibraheem Shakoura as saying.

He said he held out as long as he could to help the patients who remained but was forced to leave.

“Israeli soldiers kidnapped the bodies of the martyrs, they threatened to bomb the floor where we were, so we decided to leave Al Shifa.

“When we left the hospital building, (the Israelis) said that we would be given safe passage but actually it was not safe and not suitable for wounded people to go through this.

“I saw how young children were suffering… women were crying.

“In our journey today, we saw many dead bodies on the streets. There were people [who had been] shot everywhere.”

Speaking about the siege, which ran on for more than a week amid bomb blasts and sniper fire, Dr Shakoura said: “The smell of dead bodies was unbearable. When we tried to bury the bodies of the martyrs, the Israeli soldiers came and kidnapped the bodies.

“The Israeli soldiers bombed the main water mains. They started to bring water for us but the water was not enough.” – News Agencies / Web Desk