Israeli forces have totally besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, evacuating all staff and patients and setting the facility ablaze, after months of nonstop attacks.
On Friday, the facility’s director, Hossam Abu Safiya, said that Israeli forces began burning all of the facility’s operational departments while staff and patients were still inside.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital is under complete siege. The operating and surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned, and the fire is now spreading to the buildings,” the staff said in a statement.
Israeli forces cut off the oxygen at the hospital, staff said. Many of the hospital’s over 70 patients are at immediate risk of dying due to the siege and evacuation, and the medical staff said they are working to take patients to Indonesian Hospital, where there are no basic supplies like water, medicine or electricity. Images have also suggested that Israeli forces have surrounded Indonesian Hospital with tanks.
Staff, including women, reported Israeli soldiers forcing them to strip while being forcibly evacuated.
Video of the hospital evacuation showed a line of people, many looking like they were stripped to their underwear, walking with their hands up and little possessions but clothes in the chilling winter temperatures.
Safiya received a direct threat from Israeli forces: “This time we will arrest you.”
The hospital director has been vocal about Israel’s assault on the hospital, putting out updates each day and issuing pleas for international intervention. Israeli forces have detained him in prior raids of the facility.
The total siege appears to be the final step of Israel’s seeming plan to conquer and destroy the hospital, which began in October 2024, while Israel was embarking on its campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza.
Israeli forces escalated attacks on and near the facility on Thursday, ahead of the siege. Strikes near the hospital killed 50 Palestinians on Thursday evening, including five medical staff.
Safiya identified those killed as Ahmed Samou, a pediatrician, Esraa, a laboratory technician who went out to seek food for her family, and Fares, a maintenance technician. The two others, Abdul Majid and Maher, were on their way to a nearby roundabout 500 meters from the hospital, “when they were targeted and martyred instantly, and their bodies remain in the street where no one can reach them,” Safiya said.
The Gaza Health ministry has said that it has lost contact with the staff of Kamal Adwan, and that the fate of the patients and staff there is now “unknown.”
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