2023-11-11 13:14:53
The Dar Al Shifa hospital, whose name means ‘house of healing’, has long been seen by Gazans as a vital place of refuge during Israeli attacks. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have fled shelling, seeking protection on the grounds of the strip’s largest hospital.
Now, as Israeli troops surround Gaza City and move ever closer to the hospital, increasing shelling in the area and even in parts of the hospital itself has raised fears about the survival of the complex and the thousands of people there. They take refuge in it in the face of the worst sequence of attacks that Gaza City has suffered to date. This Saturday, the Gaza Ministry of Health announced that the hospital has lost electricity due to the bombings, which is causing the death of some patients.
“There are parts of Gaza City where there is still human activity, but when you enter Al Shifa you find a crowd, with a huge concentration of despair in every square centimeter,” explains Willaim Schomburg of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “Everywhere you look, there are people seeking shelter. “There is enormous uncertainty and fear.”
As has happened in many other public buildings in Gaza, the hospital courtyard has become a “huge camp for internally displaced people,” explains Ghassan Abu Sitta, a surgeon. Thousands of people huddle under a patchwork of brightly colored sheets in tents that cover the area surrounding the hospital entrance.
The number of those who have sought refuge in Al Shifa has continued to increase as hundreds of thousands of people fled other parts of Gaza City from the bombings. Abu Sitta estimates that there are about 50,000 people sheltering in the hospital facilities. A bright blue truck, dedicated to transporting refrigerated food, is parked among the tents set up around the hospital to store excess bodies.
A video released this Friday morning shows scared people running between tents and parked vehicles to escape an explosion within the hospital perimeter. The images show a limping man covering the back of his neck to stop bleeding while he holds on to another man to stay upright. A woman runs and touches her head with visible blood stains on a handkerchief. At another point in the hospital complex, corpses are seen scattered on the ground under a metal awning with a large hole while people covered in blood cry looking at the sky.
Israel’s military has released images showing soldiers gathered on the beach that runs along the west side of Gaza City. They have also shown attacks on buildings in the al-Shati refugee camp, just over a kilometer away, which, according to their explanations – without verification – had been used by Hamas.
11,000 dead in the Gaza Strip
The Gaza Ministry of Health has raised its toll to more than 11,000 deaths in the strip, the vast majority civilians and almost half children, since the beginning of Israel’s bombings on October 7, the day Hamas militiamen broke through. in Israel killing around 1,200 people and taking around 240 hostages.
“Gaza has become a ghost city. “There are roads blocked, buildings closed, rubble everywhere, houses destroyed…” describes Schomberg, after participating in an International Committee of the Red Cross convoy with five trucks and two other vehicles in Gaza City at the beginning of the week.
The convoy was on its way to deliver essential medical supplies to Al Quds Hospital in the southern part of the city when two of the trucks were attacked. The group was then diverted to Al Shifa.
Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gazan researcher who now lives abroad, conveys the situation that his family has described to him from the city: “It is a ghost city, you can smell death when walking down the street. At night you see stray dogs feeding on remains of corpses, remains of children’s corpses,” he says. “There are areas where there are no longer any streets standing, everything has been destroyed, nothing remains, even in areas that were previously well connected.”
Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the general director of Al Shifa, explained on Al Jazeera that the latest Israeli attack “could have been a massacre due to the number of people taking refuge in the complex. “They have bombed a building very close to the hospital and right now there are strong clashes and intense shelling next to our facilities.”
“There is not a second without a bombing near the hospital. Many of the windows of the building are already broken and there is fear among the doctors, the patients and the thousands of refugees,” he indicated.
In recent weeks, an Israeli attack hit the solar panels that provide critical power for the hospital to function. Another hit a convoy of ambulances just meters from the Al Shifa entrance, killing and wounding 21 people, according to Human Rights Watch. Israel justified this by saying that an ambulance was transporting Palestinian fighters, but did not provide any evidence to support this.
Accusations “without real basis”
The Israeli military claims that Hamas operates in tunnels under the hospital, something that both the center’s workers and Hamas deny. Hamas’s Ezzat el-Reshiq says Israel’s accusations that the hospital functions as a shield for its militias’ military infrastructure “have no basis in fact.”
UN officials say armed groups should never use infrastructure that shelters civilians, such as hospitals, to hide, but they also point out that accusations like those made by Israel cannot be used as an excuse to bomb them.
“Acts of war in places of refuge must stop,” said UN emergency coordinator Martin Griffiths in X, in response to the attacks on Al Shifa hospital. “The lives of thousands of patients, staff and civilians sheltered there are at risk.”
The hospital is currently running on an emergency generator, as fuel has practically run out following the total blockade of supplies entering Gaza. Several operating rooms are closed due to lack of power and different information indicates that surgical interventions are being performed without anesthesia due to lack of supplies. Doctors have told emergency teams that they cannot treat many of the injuries they have to deal with due to lack of material.
“The situation has gone from terrible to catastrophic: the number of displaced people in the hospital has grown exponentially,” says Schomburg. “They are running out of medical supplies and fuel. Their capacity to care for patients is decreasing while the needs continue to grow.”
Alijla assures that “the collapse of the Al Shifa hospital would be a catastrophe” and warns that “5,000 more people will die if it stops operating due to the number of seriously injured people it cares for.”
“People flee to hospitals because they normally consider them a place of international protection, they think they will never be a target. They have already experienced war situations and, although medical centers have been attacked before, they still believe that Al Shifa, Al Quds or other large hospitals in the city have international protection. That’s why they run to take refuge there.”
The Israeli Army has demanded on several occasions that the hospital be evacuated. However, Human Rights Watch emphasizes that this requirement is impossible to meet. Attacks and subsequent fires on one of the roads near the hospital have even prevented those who wanted to flee from using a route that Israel has designated as an evacuation corridor.
International protection
“Hospitals have international protection, according to the laws of war, and only lose it if they are used to commit ‘acts harmful to the enemy’ and after due warning. Evacuation of patients and hospital staff is the last option,” says Human Rights Watch.
“We are deeply concerned about the situation of thousands of civilians in the face of the attacks and fighting that are taking place in the vicinity of the hospital. We fear for children seeking medical care and shelter, people requiring life support or those who have suffered amputations following airstrikes, and victims of severe burns.”
Alijla explains that one of her sisters who lives in the vicinity of Al Shifa fled her home with her five children after a heavy chain of bombings on Thursday night. “They fled because there were missiles flying over their heads. “She saw the bombs coming and decided to leave because she has five children,” she says.
Her sister explained to Alijla that while they were fleeing the city she forced her children to separate for fear of the bombings that continued to occur in the area. She made them walk in a row, separated by a space of about 30 meters between each one. She thought that if a bomb fell on one of them, the rest could survive.”
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