The Israeli military reported intense fighting on Sunday in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where local officials warned that two hospitals were struggling to operate after seven days of bombardment.
In recent days, Israeli forces have been sweeping through Khan Younis, and they ordered Gazans sheltering in several densely packed neighborhoods of the city to flee. The fighting has reached the vicinity of at least two hospitals — Nasser, a major medical complex, and Al-Amal, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent — where thousands of Gazans have sought shelter.
The Red Crescent said on Sunday that oxygen supplies at Al-Amal Hospital were depleted “due to the ongoing siege” of the area, leaving medical staff unable to perform surgeries. The organization said that “intense shelling and heavy gunfire” around the hospital had stretched into a seventh consecutive day, and later said the bodies of three people who had been killed outside its buildings had to be buried in the courtyard because it wasn’t safe to transport them to a cemetery.
The statement came as the Israeli military said that “intensive battles” were underway in Khan Younis. Israel has referred to the city as a Hamas stronghold. The Israeli military has said that intelligence showed Hamas militants were operating from within both Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals.
The Red Crescent has rejected the allegations about Al-Amal, and Gazan health officials have denied Hamas uses hospitals as military assets, disputing accounts presented by the Israeli authorities. Some 7,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering at Al-Amal Hospital, according to Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent.
Gaza’s health ministry warned of the impact that fighting was having on Nasser Hospital. It said on Saturday that the hospital’s generators could stop working within four days because of fuel shortages and that shrapnel had damaged the facility’s water tanks, resulting in leaks in the intensive care unit.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said on Friday that Nasser Hospital was running out of fuel, food and supplies, adding that 350 patients and 5,000 displaced people remained at the hospital.
Nasser Hospital is one of only two referral hospitals that provide advanced surgical and medical emergency services, according to the International Committee for the Red Cross, which said on Thursday that “the world will bear witness to untold thousands of preventable deaths” if the hospital ceases to function.
The Israeli military is continuing to escalate its ground operation in Khan Younis, and airstrikes have pummeled the southern city, killing several people overnight on Sunday, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.
The ongoing bombardment coupled with the dire humanitarian conditions and Israeli evacuation orders have led many people to flee further south over the last few days, according to the United Nations.
One resident, Akram Al-Satri, 47, left Khan Younis on Thursday after an area adjacent to where he was sheltering, near Nasser and Al-Amal hospitals, received an evacuation order from the Israeli military.
Although his block was not ordered to evacuate, he said that he woke up on Thursday “to shooting and bombardment,” he told The New York Times. When he looked out of the window, Mr. Al-Satri said that he saw about 10 people lying dead on the ground, including two children. “All of a sudden my block became a battlefield,” he said.
That morning he moved to another area in Khan Younis where he stayed for an hour before realizing it also was not safe. Mr. Al-Satri moved again and ended up near Al-Amal hospital, where he quickly realized that the shooting there “was heavier than any other shooting I heard throughout the whole war.” Some of the many people he saw trying to flee on foot were barefoot, others were limping, he said.
ِEventually, Mr. Al-Satri ended up in Al-Mawasi, the coastal area that Israel has called a humanitarian zone, where he found overcrowded and miserable conditions, with makeshift tents that provide little protection from the weather, including heavy rain. Everyone, he said, is “trying to survive the cold first, and then to survive the war.”
