The Al Shifa hospital, the most important in the Gaza Strip, has been completely cut off, the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian enclave reported this Thursday, a day after the Israeli Army raided the medical center, when it still housed about 3,000 civilians. “Communication has been interrupted since this morning with all officials, doctors and those present at Al Shifa hospital,” the Ministry of Health, controlled by the Islamist movement Hamas, which has de facto governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, said in a statement.
The Israeli Army announced on Wednesday the start of a “precise and selective” operation inside the Al Shifa hospital, where it says it has found “a command center, weapons and technological assets” of Hamas, and this Thursday a military spokesperson confirmed to EFE that His troops “continue to search the hospital.”
As of Wednesday, some 3,000 people, including patients – including 36 newborns -, medical personnel and displaced people, were staying in the hospital despite the fact that it had already run out of electricity, drinking water, food and medicine. Some 170 unrefrigerated corpses further threatened the health situation there.
“The occupation forces destroyed medical equipment during their assault on the Al Shifa medical complex and razed the hospital courtyards,” denounced the Gaza Ministry of Health, which released a video in which medical personnel are seen transporting patients on stretchers through of a cloud of dust inside the hospital, whose facilities showed considerable damage.
For its part, the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported earlier that “bulldozers and occupation vehicles broke into the complex from its southern entrance, completely leveling the entrance and destroying all vehicles in the courtyards.”
Israeli soldiers “have placed facial recognition cameras and electronic gates in the courtyard of the medical complex, forced displaced people to remove their clothes, detained and interrogated doctors, patients and displaced people,” he added, citing Palestinian sources on the scene.
This morning, the Gaza Health Ministry said that “the Israeli occupation is waging a war against hospitals, especially in Gaza City and the northern Strip, including shelling and preventing wounded and displaced people from access medical care, water and food.
Furthermore, he described the Israeli incursion in Al Shifa as a “war crime” and denounced that, during the night, “the occupation forces were entrenched in the underground floors of the Shifa medical complex, taking medical personnel and displaced people as human shields.” “.
Israeli forces have carried out bombing raids that “hit patient rooms”, attacked the coronary artery care unit with a tank shell, “deliberately destroyed radiology machines”, rendering the CT machine and MRI, according to the ministry.
Denying that the hospital functions as a command and control center for Hamas, the Health Ministry assured that Israeli soldiers detained the only electrical generator technician and the only oxygen station technician present in Al Shifa.
Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7 after a massive attack by the Islamist group that included the launching of thousands of rockets and the infiltration into Israeli territory of some 3,000 militiamen who massacred some 1,400 people and kidnapped another 240.
Since then, Israel's air, naval and ground forces have relentlessly attacked the Gaza Strip, leaving more than 11,500 dead and almost 30,000 injured, in addition to 3,600 missing under the rubble and some 1.7 million Gazans displaced, more than two thirds of the total population.