Thousands of civilians are still stuck Tuesday in the main hospital in Gaza City, at the heart of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, deprived of water and electricity and where around 180 bodies were buried in a mass grave, according to its director.
Several thousand Palestinians, patients, staff and civilians displaced by the war that has raged since October 7, are crowding the site of the al-Chifa hospital, a huge complex housing, according to Israel, infrastructure of the Islamist movement buried in a network of tunnels.
“The situation is very serious, it’s inhumane,” warned Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on X (formerly Twitter).
At least “179 bodies” were buried Tuesday in a “common grave” dug in the al-Chifa hospital complex, its director announced to AFP, specifying that among them were seven premature babies who died due to lack of electricity to keep them alive.
“We were forced to bury them in a mass grave,” said Doctor Mohammed Abou Salmiya. “There are bodies littering the aisles of the hospital complex and the refrigerated rooms of the morgues are no longer supplied” with electricity, he added.
A journalist working with AFP inside the hospital said the smell of decomposing bodies was overpowering.
Israeli tanks were massed on Tuesday at the gates of al-Chifa, while fighting and airstrikes in the surrounding areas continued throughout the night, he added, although less intense than in previous nights.
Hostage soldier killed
Israel has been relentlessly striking the Gaza Strip since the attack launched on its soil against civilians by Hamas commandos on October 7, and has been carrying out a ground operation since October 27 with the aim of “wiping out” the Islamist movement, power in the besieged Palestinian territory.
On the Israeli side, around 1,200 people were killed, according to the authorities, the vast majority of them civilians killed on the day of the attack, of unprecedented scale and violence since the creation of Israel in 1948.
The Israeli army announced Tuesday that 46 soldiers had been killed since the start of the war.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli bombings killed a total of 11,240 people, mostly civilians, including 4,630 children, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The Israeli military estimates that some 240 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip during the Hamas attack. She announced on Tuesday the death of Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old soldier hostage of Hamas, the day after the Islamist movement published a photo presenting her as “killed by an Israeli bombing”.
Hamas accuses Israel of “procrastinating” in discussions, via mediation from Qatar, concerning the possible release of dozens of hostages in exchange for a truce.
Relatives of hostages have planned a march from Tel Aviv to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Tuesday to put pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to promote their release.
On Monday, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said soldiers “found signs” of hostages being held by Hamas in a video filmed in a cellar at Al-Children’s Hospital. Rantissi in Gaza.
He showed images of a baby bottle and a piece of clothing near a chair, as well as assault rifles, grenades and what he described as “explosive belts.”
“People are going to die”
The Hamas government said on Monday that all hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, where the most violent fighting is concentrated, were “out of service”, due to lack of electricity and fuel.
US President Joe Biden called on Israel, of which the United States is a key ally, to exercise restraint, saying al-Chifa hospital must “be protected”.
The UN continues to demand the sending of fuel to Gaza, in particular to power generators in hospitals.
The territory has been subjected since October 9 by Israel to a complete siege which deprives its population of water, electricity, food and medicine. But Israel refuses to allow fuel to pass through, saying it could be used by Hamas for its military activities.
“We have no electricity, food or water in the hospital” al-Chifa, said an MSF doctor. “People are going to die in a few hours without working ventilators,” he added.
The Israeli army, which accuses the Islamist movement of using the sick and displaced as “human shields”, said it was not targeting the hospital. She reported “efforts” to transfer incubators from an Israeli hospital to al-Chifa.
“The idea is to try to evacuate people, to evacuate as many as possible,” army spokesperson Peter Lerner said on Monday night.
According to him, “a few hundred” people were inside the hospital, while according to the Deputy Minister of Health of the Hamas government, Youssef Abou Rich, present in the hospital, around 20,000 displaced people there. would have found refuge.
“Control of Gaza”
On Tuesday, the Hamas government claimed that “more than a hundred” people had been killed since the day before in Israeli bombings, one of which left 30 dead, according to this source, in the Indonesian hospital in Jabaliya, a huge camp. refugees from the northern Gaza Strip.
Hamas has “lost control in Gaza” and its fighters are “fleeing towards the south” of the territory, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday. According to the UN, about 1.6 of the territory’s 2.4 million people have been displaced by the war.
In recent days, tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled the north of the Gaza Strip, transformed into a field of ruins, towards the south after Israel opened evacuation “corridors”.
In the south of the territory, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are massed near the border with Egypt, in disastrous humanitarian conditions.
International aid is arriving slowly from Egypt, but in very insufficient quantities according to the UN.
On the border between Israel and Lebanon, new exchanges of fire took place during the night from Monday to Tuesday between the Israeli army and armed groups in Lebanon, including the powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah, which supports Hamas.
In the West Bank, five Palestinians were killed according to a hospital source, during nighttime clashes with Israeli forces in the Tulkarem sector, in the north of this Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, plagued by an upsurge in violence on the sidelines. of the war in Gaza.