Israeli soldiers stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last remaining medical facility in the northern Gaza Strip, setting fire to large sections and ordering hundreds of people to leave.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Friday that contact had been lost with staff at the Beit Lahiya hospital, which has been under siege and heavy pressure from Israeli forces for weeks. He had no information about the fate of the patients inside, he added.
“The occupation forces are now inside the hospital and are burning it,” Munir al-Bursh, director of the ministry, said in a statement.
The Israeli military issued a statement confirming that it had launched a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital, claiming without evidence that the medical center “serves as a Hamas terrorist stronghold in northern Gaza.”
Throughout their assault on Gaza, Israeli forces have systematically besieged and attacked medical facilities – housing both patients and displaced families – under similar pretexts.
The fire breaks out
Youssef Abu el-Rish, Gaza’s deputy health minister, said Israeli forces had set fire to the hospital’s surgery department, laboratory and a warehouse.
The fire then “spread to all buildings” of the medical complex, according to a separate statement from the enclave’s Ministry of Health.
Kamal Adwan is “undergoing a suffocating siege, as the surgery and operating theater departments, the laboratory, maintenance, ambulance units and warehouses have been completely burned.”
The ministry added that all of the facility’s generators had been destroyed.
It also said that “the (Israeli) occupation army is forcibly transferring patients and wounded under the threat of guns and gun barrels to the Indonesian hospital, which lacks medical supplies, water, medicines and even electricity and generators.”
Like the Indonesian and Al Awda hospitals, Kamal Adwan has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli forces, especially after they launched a renewed ground offensive in the area more than two months ago. The north, where a famine is looming, has been under total siege and isolated from the rest of the Strip ever since.
Al-Bursh said the Israeli army had ordered 350 people to leave Kamal Adwan and head to a nearby school housing displaced families. This included 75 patients, their companions and 185 medical staff.
Images circulated in local media showed smoke billowing from the Kamal Adwan Hospital area.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya has been systematically cleared of people and razed, prompting speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone.
“Devastating blow”
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said there was a dearth of information coming from Kamal Adwan on Friday, but witnesses who were at the facility said they faced inspections by Israeli soldiers.
Witnesses also “confirmed that the Israeli army had carried out executions in the field in the vicinity (of the hospital),” Abu Azzoum said, adding that the fate of the hospital director is unknown.
Kamal Adwan has been witnessing a “gradual escalation” and “deliberate attacks” by the Israeli military, our correspondent said, adding that forced evacuations and fires have dealt a “devastating blow to northern Gaza’s already fragile health system.” .
On Thursday, health officials said five medical staff, including a pediatrician, were killed by Israeli fire in Kamal Adwan.
In a statement, Hamas blamed Israel and the United States for the fate of the hospital’s occupants.
“The (Israeli) occupation government is committing crimes in Gaza, relying on American coverage and in some Western capitals that are partners in the ongoing genocide,” he said on Telegram.
UN World Health Organization spokesperson Margaret Harris expressed concern about the situation.
“We are witnessing attacks on civilians and the health system in Gaza,” Harris told Al Jazeera. “What Gaza hospitals are exposed to is horrible, and what we are witnessing represents a punishment for the population.”
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli strikes killed at least 25 people, including 15 people in a single house in Gaza City, doctors and the civil emergency service said.
Also on Friday, 14 countries joined or signaled their intention to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.
Organizations such as the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also found that Israeli actions in Gaza are compatible with the crime of genocide.
Israel’s attack has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians since October last year, according to health officials in the enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
