Status: 13.11.2023, 10:26 a.m.
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Workers and onlookers at the scene of an attack on the Al-Najjar family home east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. © Loay Ayyoub/The Washington Post
The largest hospital in the Gaza Strip is turning into a combat zone as tens of thousands of civilians flee.
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday (Nov. 12) defended his military's assault on the northern Gaza Strip, while the United States expressed its displeasure over the hospitals attacked and international criticism over the rising civilian death toll.
The Israel Defense Forces are "proceeding as quickly as possible, but also as cautiously as possible, because we want to keep the number of civilian casualties and the number of casualties on our side as low as possible," Netanyahu told NBC News. "We don't have a fight with patients or civilians."
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But the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, al-Shifa, has turned into a combat zone in recent days. The fighting has forced tens of thousands of civilians to embark on a dangerous, hours-long march south. The scenes are reminiscent of the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – known as the Nakba, or "catastrophe."
Some 10,000 displaced people and 1,500 patients were still trapped at Shifa Hospital on Sunday, according to Munir al-Bursh, director-general of Gaza's Ministry of Health, who said the hospital was "under siege from all sides" by Israeli forces. "The coming hours are going to be very dangerous," Bursh said.
Netanyahu: Ground offensive "reduces number of civilian casualties"
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, which has been going on for just over a month, many of them by Israeli airstrikes. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after militants overran large swathes of southern Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 230 hostage.
The Israeli ground offensive, launched late last month, in which tanks have penetrated deep into the Gaza Strip, "actually reduces the number of civilian casualties because the civilian population is heeding our call to leave the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said.
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The Israel Defense Forces said their soldiers had opened and secured a passageway on Sunday to allow civilians to leave the Shifa, Rantisi and al-Nasr hospitals in Gaza City.
Rantisi and Nasr, both children's hospitals, are now empty. The last survivors in Rantisi left the hospital on Sunday, a day after Nasr staff evacuated patients and displaced people "under the threat of [Israeli] weapons and tanks," Nasr director Bakr Qaoud told the Washington Post. The Post was unable to independently verify either his or the IDF's report.
Israel Continues to Reject Calls for Ceasefire
While Israel has agreed to daily pauses in fighting to allow evacuations, it has rejected calls for a ceasefire. As fighting raged between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in Gaza City on Sunday, civilians trapped in their homes ran out of food and water.
A father of three from the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood collapsed on the phone on Sunday when The Post asked him to describe how his 10-year-old son had fared. The boy was killed after a rocket hit the kitchen of their home on Saturday afternoon. His body is still with the family, the father said, because they had no safe way to bury him.
The father, who wished to remain anonymous to protect his safety, said he and his wife were injured in the attack but did not have access to medical care.
Hospital no longer operational
Aid organizations and medical personnel in the few remaining hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip said they too were trapped by the fighting and without electricity.
The al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City is no longer operational, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which operates it, said on Sunday. "The suspension of services is due to the end of available fuel and the power outage," the organization explained.
At Shifa Hospital, Bursh said the Israeli strikes hit electric generators, water wells, part of the intensive care unit, a floor of the maternity hospital and an oxygen station. Three of the hospital's 38 premature babies have died since Saturday, he said. "The rest have severe complications from vomiting, diarrhea and colds," he said.
The IDF has denied attacking the hospital or attacking civilians. She said she was fighting militants in the Shifa area and that the hospital was located above a Hamas military headquarters.
The Post cannot independently verify the IDF's claims about the Shifa or confirm the source of the attacks on the facility.
António Guterres sharply criticizes Israel
Netanyahu said on Sunday that the Gaza authorities had rejected Israel's offer on Saturday night to supply the Shifa with "enough fuel to run the hospital, run the incubators and so on."
Bursh confirmed that health authorities had rejected the offer on the grounds that it was only a fraction of the 10,000 litres of fuel the hospital needs per day.
Dozens of bodies lie outside the hospital, Bursh said, as staff can't safely pick them up. Others rotted in the morgue, which is no longer refrigerated.
In an interview with CNN on Sunday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that Netanyahu's claims that Israel abides by international conflict laws are "simply not true" and that the humanitarian principle of protecting civilians "is not being respected."
USA: "No firefight in a hospital"
Although the Biden administration supports the Israeli war effort, officials have also called on the country to reduce the civilian death toll. "The bottom line for the United States is that we don't want to see firefights in a hospital," White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday.
"We don't want innocent patients who are sick or wounded to be injured or killed in the crossfire," he said. "This is how we see this matter, and this is how we communicate with our Israeli interlocutors."
Netanyahu on Sunday reaffirmed his determination to continue the war. Asked if Israel could succeed without global support, he told NBC: "We will win this war. We have no choice."
He spoke of an "alliance for peace" that includes "Israel, the United States, the moderate Arab states and the rest of the civilized world."
About the authors
Claire Parker is the head of the Washington Post's Cairo bureau, leading coverage of North Africa and Yemen.
Miriam Berger covers foreign news for The Washington Post from Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Swiss Post in 2019, she lived in Jerusalem and Cairo and reported freelance-based from the Middle East, as well as parts of Africa and Central Asia.
Hospitals in the south of the country, which are already overcrowded and have limited resources, are ill-equipped to take in more people. Only two hospitals in the region are capable of treating complex injuries, and they are already struggling to care for the injured in the central and southern Gaza Strip, Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza program manager for the nonprofit Medical Aid for Palestinians, told The Post.
At Abu Youssef El-Najar Hospital, a small medical facility in the southern city of Rafah, there are limited amounts of electricity, gas, medicine or water, a doctor told The Post, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the press. The hospital has only 18 dialysis machines to care for more than 200 patients, he said.
"The number of wounded is increasing and services are decreasing," he said. "I'm really exhausted. The situation is hopeless."
Harb reported from London and Mahfouz from Cairo. Hazem Balousha in Amman, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Jennifer Hassan and Leo Sands in London, Kelly Kasulis Cho in Seoul and Mariana Alfaro in Washington contributed to this report.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article has been automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English by the "Washingtonpost.com" on November 12, 2023 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to the readers of IPPEN. MEDIA portals.