An Israeli airstrike destroyed parts of a hospital in Gaza City early on Sunday, as Israel continued its military offensive in the war-battered Palestinian territory and cut off access to the southern city of Rafah.
The Palestinian civil defence agency said Israel’s air force fired missiles at al-Ahli hospital at around 2am. It was the only hospital still fully functioning in Gaza City after the destruction of medical facilities in the northern area of the strip.
The agency said the bombing “led to the destruction of the surgery building and the oxygen generation station for the intensive care units”.
There were no reports of casualties but the Gaza health ministry said one child died during the rushed evacuation as doctors were unable to provide urgent care.
The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, was among those who condemned the strike, calling it “deplorable”. “Israel’s attacks on medical facilities have comprehensively degraded access to healthcare in Gaza,” Lammy said.
Hospitals, which are protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on 7 October 2023. The Israeli military has accused Hamas of embedding military operations in hospitals and civilian buildings, which the group has denied.
Al-Ahli hospital is run by the Anglican church in Jerusalem. In a statement, the episcopal diocese of Jerusalem said it was appalled at the airstrike, and said it was the fifth time the hospital had been targeted.
In a statement confirming the strike, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) alleged the hospital was a command and control centre used by Hamas.
“The compound was used by Hamas terrorists to plan and execute terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” the military said. In a statement in response, Hamas denied the allegations, calling them lies by the IDF “to “justify its savage crimes”.
According to witnesses, doctors and patients were given less than 20 minutes’ warning to evacuate the building before the strike. Video footage circulating online appeared to show people fleeing the building as it was engulfed in smoke and flames. The IDF said it had taken steps to “mitigate harm to civilians” and issued “advance warnings”.
Dr Moataz Harara, the head of the hospital’s emergency department, said of the evacuation: “The scene was heartbreaking and painful. You could see patients walking out on foot or being carried on beds, all of them filled with terror and fear etched on their faces. Women and children were screaming and crying.”
Harara said the hospital had previously been treating between 300 and 500 patients a day, on top of 120 inpatients. But he confirmed Sunday’s attack had left the hospital with a “complete inability to operate” and meant it could no longer accept any new patients. The radiology room and laboratories had also been devastated, he added.
Harara said growing numbers in Gaza were facing a “humanitarian disaster and famine” at the same time as medical facilities were coming under attack.
Since the breakdown of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in March, Gaza’s health sector has been further crippled by a blockade on humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, by the Israeli government.
It has left people facing acute shortages of food, water and medicines, a tactic that rights groups say amounts to a war crime. Israel maintains that enough essential medical supplies have entered Gaza.
Across the strip, Israel continued to escalate its military offensive and vowed to seize large parts of Gaza to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages and accept new ceasefire terms. The Gaza health ministry said that 35 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza on Sunday.
On Saturday, Israel said it had completed its takeover of a new “security zone” that cut off the southern city of Rafah from the rest of Gaza, part of a wider Israeli operation to establish and expand a security buffer zone across southernmost Gaza where Palestinians are banned from entering.
The defence minister, Israel Katz, announced that Israel’s military had seized the corridor between Rafah and Khan Younis, which he referred to as the “Morag axis”, giving Israel effective control of the area stretching from the Egyptian border to Rafah. Evacuation orders were also given for several neighbourhoods in Khan Younis on Saturday night.
The prewar population of Rafah was about 275,000, which earlier this year expanded to an estimated 1.4 million as Palestinians were displaced from north and central Gaza by Israeli security operations.
But last week Israel once again issued sweeping evacuation orders for all those staying in Rafah, displacing swathes of Gaza’s population of 2 million people. In the last three weeks alone, dozens of evacuation orders have been issued and 400,000 Palestinians told to move, according to the UN.
On Friday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said more than two-thirds of Gaza was either under active displacement orders or designated as “no-go” zones, where humanitarian groups cannot operate freely. The areas of Gaza that remain habitable continue to shrink and most people are living packed together in squalid tents or the rubble of their homes.
The establishment of Israeli control over crucial corridors in the south and northern areas of Gaza, as well as the expanding security buffer zone, means Israel now controls more than 50% of the strip.
Katz vowed to continue to expand operations “vigorously” across the rest of Gaza. “IDF activity will soon expand strongly to additional locations throughout most of Gaza and you will have to evacuate the fighting zones,” he said.
The statement by Katz urged Palestinians to stand up and remove Hamas and release the remaining hostages, saying: “This is the only way to stop the war.” There was no immediate Hamas response.
Since the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
