GAZA STRIP: Israeli tanks were massed near the gates of Gaza’s main hospital, where Palestinians were trapped in worse conditions on Tuesday as US President Joe Biden urged Israel to protect the complex.
After days of heavy air strikes around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, witnesses said armoured vehicles and tanks were meters from the besieged facility, which has become a focal point of the 5-week-old war.
The United Nations (UN) says that thousands, and perhaps more than ten thousand people, including patients, displaced civilians, and staff, may be trapped inside the hospital and unable to escape due to intense fighting nearby, according to AFP news agency.
Amid reports of premature babies dying for lack of electricity and patients facing gunfire, a surgeon working for Doctors Without Borders (DWB) said the situation inside the hospital had become “very bad”.
The doctor said that they do not have electricity in the hospital. There is no water in the hospital. There is no food; it is inhuman.
Israeli Attacks Martyr Over 11000 Innocent Palestinians
The health ministry in Gaza said that Israel’s attacks have already killed 11,240 people, mostly innocent civilians, including thousands of minors.
Israel says that forty-six of its soldiers have been killed in fighting in Gaza.
Biden called on Israel to use less intrusive action relative to the hospital, some of his most pointed statements on Israeli operations to date. “The hospital must be protected,” he told journalists.
Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner put the number of people inside the hospital at “a few hundred”, while the deputy health minister of the Hamas government, Youssef Abu Rish, who is currently in the hospital, said at least twenty-thousand displaced people had sought refuge in the facility.
International aid groups speak of hundreds of Palestinians displaced and an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
