Geneva – Together – Doctors and the World Health Organization said that Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals, the last two hospitals still open in northern Gaza, are barely functioning, as the Israeli war enters its eighth month.
Doctors at the two hospitals said that Israeli forces opened fire on their buildings and deployed snipers near one of them.
The Acting Director of Al Awda Hospital, Dr. Muhammad Saleh, said that ‘today is the third day of the siege of Al Awda Hospital in northern Gaza,’ and Israeli forces are ‘firing on the hospital buildings’ and ‘snipers’ have taken up positions in nearby homes.
He said that the Israeli army destroyed the southern wall of the hospital, while ‘all the medical staff and patients’ were still inside the hospital wings, which had become ‘very difficult to move between.’
But hospital employees have to bring water ‘from the second building to the first because the occupation forces struck the first building with a shell that targeted the fifth floor and destroyed the wat
er tanks,’ he added.
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a press conference in Geneva that ‘148 hospital workers and 22 patients and their companions are trapped inside’ the hospital.
A World Health Organization team visited the Al Awda Hospital building regularly in April to deliver medical supplies and fuel, but Ghebreyesus also reported that snipers had targeted the building and that artillery had hit the fifth floor.
Doctors Without Borders’ emergency coordinator in Gaza, Donia Al-Dakheili, said that “nothing enters or exits” from the hospital for fear of sniper fire.
After she spoke to the operating room supervisor at Al Awda Hospital, she added that “he has been hiding for a few days, and he can hear gunshots.”
Doctor Saleh did not report any injuries, but he said that what was happening was reminiscent of the recent Israeli military operation in the area of ??the hospital located next to the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
In December, I
sraeli forces surrounded Al Awda Hospital for several days, killing two of its staff and arresting others, MSF reported at the time.
Yesterday, Tuesday, also witnessed the evacuation of patients and staff from Kamal Adwan Hospital, also located in northern Gaza, according to the hospital director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safia.
Abu Safiya said, “Currently, the hospital is being evacuated of the wounded, patients, and medical staff… There are many patients that the medical teams were not able to evacuate.”
He added that “the reception and emergency gate at Kamal Adwan Hospital was subjected to artillery shelling” as the soldiers advanced towards the complex.
The representative of the World Health Organization in the Palestinian Territories in Jerusalem, Rick Pepperkorn, said that the reception room in the hospital’s intensive care unit was bombed.
“At the moment, there are still 20 health staff members and 13 patients,” Pepperkorn added. He added that Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda are “the only two hospitals that are
still working, and we cannot afford for them to stop working.”
“These are the only two remaining functioning hospitals in northern Gaza. Ensuring their ability to provide health services is essential,” Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.
The World Health Organization indicated that Israeli forces raided several medical facilities in the Strip, including the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, which is the largest, but the Israeli army turned it into rubble during an operation it carried out there and in the neighborhoods surrounding it in March.
The Israeli army claims that Hamas uses hospitals as command centers to plan attacks against its forces, which the movement denies.
Source: Maan News Agency