Israel said on Saturday that it had arrested the director of a hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip that had been presented as a Palestinian Hamas command centre and was now empty of patients and staff, according to the World Health Organisation, which said it was ‘appalled’.
The Kamal Adwan hospital was the last major hospital still operating in the north of the Palestinian territory, devastated by more than a year of war between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas.
It is now ‘empty’ and ‘out of service’, said the World Health Organisation (WHO), following a major offensive by the Israeli army.
Late on Saturday afternoon, the army said that it had completed ‘a targeted operation’, launched the previous day, against Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, who it believed were operating in and around the establishment.
It also confirmed that it had arrested for questioning the director of the hospital, Dr Hossam Abou Safiya, ‘suspected of being a Hamas terrorist’, one of more than 240 arrests in all.
‘This is the number of terrorists we expected,’ said army spokesman Nadav Shoshani. ‘However, we did not expect to find thousands of weapons’.
Since 6 October, the Israeli army has stepped up its ground and air offensive in the north of the Gaza Strip to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.
It regularly accuses Hamas of using hospitals as bases for preparing and launching attacks against its troops, a charge denied by the Islamist movement.
Mohammad, a witness who preferred not to give his surname, told AFP that the army had ‘asked all the young men to undress before leaving the hospital and go to a school used as a detention and interrogation centre’.
‘Once the interrogation was over, they (the soldiers) put us in a lorry and took off our clothes. We stayed in the lorry from two to six in the morning before being released,’ Ramadan Al-Aswad, a patient at the hospital, told AFP.
The WHO, ‘appalled’ by the Israeli raid, also relayed accusations that ‘several people were stripped naked and forced to walk towards the south of Gaza’.
According to the Hamas government's Ministry of Health, the soldiers arrested dozens of medical staff from the Kamal Adwan hospital as well as its director.
‘The (Israeli) occupation has completely destroyed the medical, humanitarian and rescue backbone in northern Gaza’, Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the local Civil Defence, told AFP.
Located in Beit Lahia, the Kamal Adwan hospital played a crucial role in the besieged Gaza Strip, whose health services had run dry after more than a year of war.
‘The situation is catastrophic, there are no more medical services, ambulances or first-aiders in the north of Gaza’, 50-year-old Ammar al-Barch told AFP.
The Civil Defence also reported that nine people died in an Israeli strike on a house in the centre of the Palestinian territory on Saturday morning.
Israel announced that it had intercepted ‘two projectiles’ fired from northern Gaza over its territory. Sirens were sounded in the Jerusalem, Negev and Shephelah regions.
Military operations are expected to continue as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, aged 75, is due to undergo prostate surgery on Sunday, his office said on Saturday.
In response to the Hamas attack from Gaza on 7 October 2023, the Israeli army launched a campaign of aerial bombardments followed by a ground offensive against the Palestinian territory.
According to the latest figures from the Hamas government's Ministry of Health, a total of 45,484 Palestinians, mainly civilians, died, including at least 48 in the space of 24 hours.
On the Israeli side, the Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official figures.
With AFP.
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