Israeli military vehicles advanced on Monday to the gates of the besieged Al-Shifa hospital complex, Gazan health officials said, as medical staff painted an increasingly calamitous picture of conditions inside a facility where fuel, medicine and food are running out for the hundreds of patients and thousands of people sheltering there.
Dozens of corpses are decomposing at the hospital because there is no way to preserve or remove them, a head nurse and a health official said.
Doctors and Gazan health officials have said for days that patients at Al-Shifa were dying because of a lack of electricity at the hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest. Jihan Miqdad, a head nurse in the emergency room at Al-Shifa, said in a phone interview on Monday that patients who were on life support in the intensive care unit were dying because there was little oxygen.
“The situation here is catastrophic in every sense of the word,” she said.
The hospital and other medical centers in Gaza City have been struggling for weeks to maintain operations as Israeli forces closed in and as supplies of fuel and medicine dwindled. The head of the World Health Organization warned on Sunday that Al-Shifa was “not functioning as a hospital anymore” and was struggling to provide care after three days “without electricity, without water and with very poor internet.”
People sheltering
at main entrance
Internal medicine
and dialysis
People sheltering
at main entrance
Internal medicine
and dialysis
Israeli officials say Hamas uses hospitals in Gaza, including Al-Shifa, as shields to conceal vast complexes for their fighters in tunnels underneath. Hamas has denied the allegations.
On Monday, Israeli military vehicles reached a gate on the eastern side of the Al-Shifa complex, where the maternity hospital is, the Gazan health ministry said. In recent days, Israeli troops have reached at least two other hospitals in northern Gaza, stepping up their push to empty the facilities, according to Israeli military officials, as fighting around them intensifies.
Al-Shifa was “in the circle of death,” the health ministry said.
A spokesman for the health ministry, Dr. Medhat Abbas, said in a phone interview that more than 100 bodies were lying in the hospital’s front yard, another 50 were inside and around 60 were in the morgue. The corpses are starting to decompose, “which turns the hospital into a dangerous place from an epidemiological standpoint,” he said.
Staff members and some 8,000 displaced people sheltering at the hospital are suffering from thirst and hunger, Dr. Abbas said. Medical teams are surviving on biscuits and dates, he added.
Dr. Nasser Bolbol, the head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Al-Shifa, said in a phone interview that three premature babies had died after the equipment that provides the department with oxygen was knocked out. Hospital staff members