A lot of people, including a lot of babies, were still stuck inside Gaza’s biggest hospital when Israeli troops reached its gates.
Thousands of people have left the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, but health workers say the patients who are still there are dying because there isn’t enough electricity because of the heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants.
Machines that save lives, like incubators, can’t work without fuel to power engines. The health minister in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, said that at least 32 patients, including three babies born before they were due, had died in the last three days.
The Israeli military said it was giving people safe ways to get south from the north where fighting was very bad, but Palestinian officials inside Shifa said the area was always being hit by heavy gunfire.
Israeli ground forces entered Gaza after Hamas militants killed at least 1,200 people and took 240 prisoners in Israel in a surprise attack on October 7. Since then, fighting has been focusing in a tightening circle around Shifa’s gates.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have said many times that Hamas runs its operations from tunnels under Shifa. Hamas and hospital workers have both said this is not true.
It was reported on X that Shifa has between 600 and 650 inpatients, 200 to 500 health workers, and about 1,500 displaced people looking for shelter. This information was shared with the World Health Organization.
He said in a post on X that Shifa was “not functioning as a hospital anymore.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the head of the WHO.
He said, “It’s sad that the number of patient deaths has gone up a lot.” People around the world can’t keep quiet while hospitals, which should be safe places, become places of death, destruction, and hopelessness.
On Sunday, Dr. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a surgeon at Shifa, said that the bombing had forced staff to line up 37 newborn babies on regular beds and use what little power was available to keep them warm. He said, “We expect to lose more of them every day.”
Al-Quds, another hospital in Gaza City, had to close on Sunday because it ran out of power. The facility is run by the Palestinian Red Crescent, which said that Israeli troops were stationed nearby and that plans were being made to evacuate 6,000 patients, medics, and people who had to leave their homes.
New fighting on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and more US attacks on militias with ties to Iran in neighboring Syria made people worry about a bigger regional conflict. The war was now in its sixth week.
Allies like the US and France are getting more worried about the number of deaths in Gaza and are putting more pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire. The Palestinian government says that more than 11,000 people have been killed, with about 40% of those being children, and that more than half of the population has been forced to leave their homes.
The US does not want firefights to happen in hospitals where patients who are just trying to get medical care are caught in the crossfire. The White House’s chief security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CBS News on Sunday that the US and the Israeli Defense Forces have talked about this.
Twelve of the 27 EU countries said on Sunday that Hamas should stop using hospitals and citizens as “human shields” and that “immediate humanitarian pauses” should be put in place in Gaza.
The spokesman for the Gaza health minister, Ashraf Al-Qidra, who was in Shifa on Monday, said that an Israeli tank was at the hospital gate. “The tank is outside the gate of the outpatient clinic department. This is how things look this morning.”
It has told residents to leave and doctors to send sick people somewhere else. The group says it tried to get babies out of the neonatal ward and left 300 liters of fuel at the hospital door for emergency generators, but Hamas stopped them.
Qidra said she didn’t say no to the offers of fuel, but the 300 liters would only power the hospital for 30 minutes. He said that the Red Cross or another foreign aid group had to bring Shifa 8,000 to 10,000 liters of fuel every day.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Monday that Israel’s navy had hit one of its buildings in southern Gaza.
“This recent attack is yet another sign that nowhere in Gaza is safe,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA. Not in the south, not in the middle, and not in the north. The fact that civilian infrastructure like UN buildings, hospitals, schools, shelters, and places of prayer are not being protected shows how horrible life is for people in Gaza every day.
