CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – Fighting continued to rage on Saturday near Gaza’s main hospital, Al Chifa, where Israel said it had killed 170 Palestinian fighters since its operation began on Monday, while the Palestinian Health Ministry denounced the deaths of five patients.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad confirmed that their fighters were confronting Israeli soldiers around the huge hospital complex, while denying any presence inside the facility.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, five patients died due to lack of proper care over the past six days. Other patients are in critical condition, he added.
The Israeli army, which has lost two soldiers killed in combat since the start of the operation, ensures that it is protecting hospital staff and patients and providing them with water and food.
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Reuters was unable to access the hospital to verify the situation on site.
Al Chifa, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip before the war, is today one of the few health establishments still partially operational in the north of the territory.
According to residents living nearby, the Israeli army dynamited dozens of houses and buildings in the surrounding area and destroyed roads with bulldozers.
The military operation in Al Chifa marks the return of large-scale fighting in northern Gaza, which the Israeli army claimed several months ago to have “pacified” by driving out Hamas fighters and other Palestinian groups. .
According to the IDF, 350 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad were arrested in six days, in addition to 170 who were reportedly killed.
Hamas disputed these figures, saying that many of the victims were patients at the hospital or civilians who had taken refuge there.
A pharmacologist working in Al Chifa, Mohamed al Nono was shot dead by Israeli soldiers who ordered him and other doctors to evacuate the hospital, his family told Reuters. Mohamed al Nono is the brother of Taher al Nono, press advisor to the exiled political leader of Hamas, Ismaïl Haniyeh.
The Israeli army has not commented on the incident.
Israeli bombardment and fighting also continues in the central and southern Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army said it had killed around 20 gunmen in the past 24 hours, while Palestinian health services reported eight dead and others injured in a house destroyed by an airstrike in Rafah.
More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-led enclave’s health services.
(Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Bassam Masoud in Gaza and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, French version Tangi Salaün)
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