French president Emmanuel Macron has called on Israel to stop killing babies, women and elderly people in Gaza as the country comes under mounting international pressure, including from its main ally the US, to do more to protect Palestinian civilians.
Macron’s comments came hours before aid agency Doctors Without Borders said it was “extremely concerned” about the safety of patients and medical staff at al-Shifa hospital – the Gaza Strip’s largest – around which fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas was raging on Saturday.
“Over the last few hours, the attacks against al-Shifa Hospital have dramatically intensified,” it said in a statement posted online on Saturday morning. “Our staff at the hospital have reported a catastrophic situation inside just few hours ago.”
While recognising Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas’ deadly 7 October attack on Israel, Macron said in a BBC interview published late on Friday that there was “no justification” for the bombing and that a ceasefire would benefit Israel.
“There is no other solution than first a humanitarian pause, going to a ceasefire, which will allow to protect … all civilians having nothing to do with terrorists,” he said.
“Today, civilians are bombed – de facto. These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop.”
In his strongest comments to date on the plight of civilians caught in the crossfire, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told reporters on a visit to India on Friday: “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.”
But Blinken reaffirmed US support for Israel’s campaign to ensure that Gaza can no longer be used “as a platform for launching terrorism”.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said on Friday the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments had risen to more than 11,000. Israel’s foreign ministry said around 1,200 people had been killed, mostly civilians, in the Hamas attack on 7 October, a revision of the earlier death toll.
In response to Macron’s comments, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said world leaders should be condemning Hamas and not Israel. “These crimes that Hamas [is] committing today in Gaza will be committed tomorrow in Paris, New York and anywhere in the world,” Netanyahu said.
Israel has said that Hamas militants, who are holding as many as 240 hostages of different nationalities taken in last month’s attack, would exploit a truce to regroup if there were a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia was to host an extraordinary joint Islamic-Arab summit in Riyadh on Saturday, the Saudi foreign ministry said.
In a serious test for Saudi diplomacy the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, will have to walk a fine line between being seen merely to repeat previously unheeded appeals to Israel to show constraint, or instead to start to take practical steps such as an oil boycott of Israel.
Saudi Arabia had originally planned to hold two separate summits this weekend, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit and the Arab League summit.
However, in a statement late on Friday Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said the two would be combined due to “the exceptional circumstances” in Gaza “as countries feel the need to unify efforts and come out with a unified collective position”.
The leader of the militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, will also make his second speech this month on Saturday, setting out his latest thinking.
He ended his last one-hour speech on 3 November by saying he was leaving all military options on the table and that this dispute with Israel was of a different order to all its predecessors.
The speech will come after Israel killed a further seven Hezbollah fighters on its northern border with Lebanon on Friday, taking the total death toll of Hezbollah fighters to 78 since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October – a number well exceeding the number killed in the 2006 war with Israel, prompting internal debates about its next steps.
Meanwhile, Palestinians reported strikes or sniper fire at two hospitals and a school in Gaza on Friday and fighting intensified overnight to Saturday.
Maher Sharif, a nurse heading to the al-Shifa hospital when it was struck on Friday, described how people threw themselves to the ground.
“I saw dead bodies, including women and children,” she said, according to the statement by Doctors Without Borders. “The scene was horrific.”
Gaza officials said missiles landed in a courtyard of al-Shifa in the early hours of Friday, damaged the Indonesian Hospital and reportedly set fire to the Nasser Rantissi paediatric cancer hospital.
Israel’s military said later that a misfired projectile launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza had hit al-Shifa.
The hospitals, filled with displaced people as well as patients and medical staff, are in northern Gaza, where Israel says the Hamas militants are concentrated.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said the Hamas headquarters was in al-Shifa hospital’s basement, which meant the facility could lose its protected status and become a legitimate target.
Israel says Hamas hides weapons in tunnels under hospitals, charges Hamas denies.
The World Health Organisation director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that health workers the group was in contact with at al-Shifa had been forced to leave the hospital in search of safety.
“Many of the thousands sheltering at the hospital are forced to evacuate due to security risks, while many still remain there,” Tedros wrote on social media.
Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said Israel had bombed al-Shifa hospital buildings five times.
“One Palestinian was killed and several were wounded in the early morning attack,” he said by phone. Videos verified by Reuters showed scenes of panic and people covered in blood.
Israeli tanks have taken up positions around the Nasser Rantissi hospital as well as the al-Quds hospital, medical staff said earlier.
The Palestinian Red Cross said Israeli forces were shooting at al-Quds hospital and there were violent clashes, with one person killed and 28 wounded, most of them children.
Israeli army spokesperson Lieut Col Richard Hecht said at a briefing the army “does not fire on hospitals”.
“If we see Hamas terrorists firing from hospitals we’ll do what we need to do. We’re aware of the sensitivity [of hospitals], but again, if we see Hamas terrorists, we’ll kill them.”
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
