Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants outside Gaza’s largest hospital has prompted thousands of people to flee from the sprawling medical facility, but hundreds of patients and others displaced by the war remained inside, health officials said Monday.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a day earlier that the UN agency was in contact with Shifa hospital, which he said had been without electricity and water for three days, and noted that gunfire and bombings outside the compound “have exacerbated the already critical circumstances.”
“Regrettably, the hospital is not functioning as a hospital anymore,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Patients inside the hospital include dozens of babies at risk of dying because of a lack of electricity, health officials at the facility said.
More than two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes since the war began.
Gaza City, the largest urban area in the territory, is the focus of Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas following the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that set off the war.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
More than 1,200 people in Israel died, most of them in the Hamas attack, and about 240 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza by Palestinian militants
Currently:
— Thousands flee Gaza’s main hospital but hundreds, including babies, still trapped by fighting
— Hospitals have special protection under the rules of war. Why are they in the crosshairs in Gaza?
— Biden’s certitude on Israel gives way to the complexities and casualties of a brutal war
— Attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah group wound 7 Israeli troops, 10 others along border with Israel
