On Thursday, Israeli forces struck what was, just days ago, northern Gaza’s last fully operational hospital, destroying a cache of UN-delivered medical supplies amid a “critical” shortage of supplies in the besieged facility.
Palestinian officials reported that the Israeli planes bombed the third floor of Kamal Adwan Hospital on Thursday morning. The strike led to the burning of a warehouse holding medicine and other crucial supplies that had been delivered just five days before by the World Health Organization (WHO) — which had previously warned that there was a “critical shortage of medical supplies” in north Gaza.
According to Palestinian news agency Wafa, Israel’s attacks have caused surgical operations to be “completely suspended” at the hospital. The hospital’s dialysis unit is also out of service as a result of the attack, hospital director Hossam Abu Safiyeh has said. Four medical staffers were wounded in the strike, according to Safiyeh.
WHO added that a desalination station and water tanks were hit in the strike. “The hospital has been barely functioning since the most recent raid. The latest attack is putting patients’ lives at grave risk,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We currently have no surgeons on site,” Safiyeh said in a plea for anyone with surgical expertise to come to the hospital. “There are children with abdominal shrapnel injuries who need exploratory surgery and bleeding control before it is too late.”
Safiyeh is one of only two doctors left at Kamal Adwan after Israeli forces, in their brutal, days-long siege of the facility, arrested nearly all of the 70 staff at the hospital. Roughly a dozen were released shortly after being detained, reports said.
What’s left at the hospital is a skeleton crew utterly unable to meet the dire need for medical services in north Gaza, where Israel has been conducting a ground invasion for four weeks. As of Tuesday, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the two doctors have been responsible for at least 150 injured patients.
Though Israel has carried out more raids and strikes in the area since then, causing surges in patients being taken to the hospital, countless Palestinians have not even been able to reach the facility, as Israel’s violence forced first responders in north Gaza to suspend all services last week. Medical staff have said that there is not a single ambulance left for the hundreds of wounded in north Gaza, and the only transportation for the wounded is mule-drawn carts or people carrying them on foot.
The fate of Kamal Adwan’s medical staff is unclear, though Israeli forces have claimed, without evidence, that they had actually detained fighters at the hospital — a dubious claim that the Israeli military often uses to justify abducting thousands of Palestinians and imprisoning them in torture camps. Palestinian doctors have been regularly detained and tortured by Israeli forces throughout the genocide, sometimes to the point of death.
On Thursday, Médecins Sans Frontières said that the group received confirmation that one of their orthopedic surgeons, Mohammed Obeid, was among those abducted on Saturday.
“Dr Obeid has been working tirelessly since the beginning of the war, offering his support as a doctor to multiple hospitals in Gaza. His work has saved countless lives,” the group said. “Our last contact with Dr Obeid was on the afternoon of 25 October. He had been sheltering and offering his support as a surgeon at Kamal Adwan hospital when it was besieged by Israeli forces.”
Just before he was abducted, Israeli forces struck his house, Obeid said. In a statement last week before Israeli forces’ total siege of the hospital, he described the horrors of Israel’s assault.
“There is death in all types and forms in Kamal Adwan hospital and north Gaza. The bombardment does not stop. The artillery does not stop. The planes do not stop. There is heavy shelling, and the hospital is targeted too,” the doctor said. “There are no words to describe the situation in Kamal Adwan hospital: it is disastrous. The hospital is completely overwhelmed. There are injured people everywhere, outside and inside the hospital, and we do not have medical and surgical equipment to treat them.”
U.S.-based humanitarian group MedGlobal also said on Monday that Israeli forces had detained five of its staff.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have begun closing in on Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, officials have reported. According to Munir Al Barsh, the Gaza Ministry of Health’s director general, the Israeli military fired directly at Indonesian Hospital early on Thursday.
“It’s literally a street by street extermination campaign,” said journalist Mariam Barghouti.
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