The al-Ahli Arab hospital, one of the last still in operation in the north of the Gaza Strip, stopped functioning on Tuesday after being stormed by the Israeli army, its director said.
The Israeli army besieged this hospital in Gaza City on Monday evening, arrested several doctors, nurses and wounded, and destroyed part of the compound, the director of the establishment, doctor Fadel, told AFP. Naim.
“The intrusion of the occupying army put the hospital out of service. We cannot accommodate patients or injured people,” he told AFP.
Four people injured on Monday by Israeli fire while they were in the hospital died on Tuesday, he added.
“They blindfolded us and tied us up. Our hands hurt from the ropes. We remained tied up for more than nine hours in the cold,” a nurse, Mohamad Araj, told AFPTV after being released.
“They tortured whoever they wanted. We heard the screams even though we were blindfolded. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us, whether we were going to be killed or whether we were going to survive,” he added.
When questioned, the Israeli army did not immediately react to these allegations.
Al-Ahli Arab, also called Baptist Hospital, had already been damaged after an explosion in its parking lot on October 17, causing more than 400 deaths according to Hamas authorities.
Hamas had blamed this explosion on a strike by Israel, which denied it, claiming to have “evidence” that it was a missed shot by Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian armed group.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in the Hamas government, Ashraf al-Qidreh, also affirmed on Tuesday that another hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip, al-Awda, located in Jabaliya, had been transformed “into barracks” by the Israeli army.
According to him, the army is holding 240 people in the hospital, “including 80 members of the nursing staff and 40 patients” and has arrested its director, Doctor Ahmad Mhanna.
The humanitarian situation, already catastrophic, continues to worsen in the Gaza Strip due to intensive Israeli bombardments, according to relief organizations operating there.
Shortages of water, electricity and food remain glaring, despite the arrival of humanitarian aid.
On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) indicated that al-Ahli Arab hospital was receiving “critical patients” from the neighboring al-Chifa hospital “for surgical interventions”.
Al-Chifa, the largest hospital complex in the Gaza Strip, is no longer operating at a minimum and with a very small team, after being targeted in November by a large-scale operation by the Israeli army which accuses Hamas of use hospitals as command centers.
Less than a third of hospitals in the Gaza Strip are operational, and only partially, according to the UN.
Hospitals have been hit several times by Israeli strikes since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, triggered after an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian movement on Israeli soil on October 7.
In total, 1,140 people, mostly civilians, were killed that day, according to an AFP count based on the latest official Israeli figures.
In retaliation, Israel, which promised to destroy the Islamist movement, has been bombing the Gaza Strip since October 7, where nearly 19,670 people, mostly civilians, have been killed, according to the Hamas government.