New Delhi: All patients in the intensive care unit of Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital have died, its director told Al Jazeera Friday, on the third day of Israel’s siege of the enclave’s largest medical facility.
The hospital’s director, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, said there were 7,000 people in the hospital — patients, medical staff and those taking shelter — and that doctors were still working to help patients.
Salmiya said the hospital had become a “big prison” and a “mass grave” for all those inside.
“We are left with nothing, no power, no food, no water. with every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight we lost 22 persons, [and] for the past three days the hospital has been kept under siege,” Salmiya was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.
America’s ABC News had reported Wednesday that 43 of the 63 patients in the ICU had died as oxygen ran out due to Israel’s siege.
Dr Ahmed Mokhallalati, head of the hospital’s plastic surgery department, told the American news channel that they were burying bodies inside the hospital premises.
The Israeli Defence Forces entered the hospital Wednesday — under cover of heavy shelling — after days of surrounding it with tanks.
The IDF maintains that the hospital is an important command centre for Hamas, a claim that the militant group has denied. Gaza has been controlled by the group since 2007.
Israeli forces have searched the hospital floor by floor as doctors and patients remain sheltered inside. During its searches, Israel’s military said, it found intelligence material, weapons and information about the hostages.
Most of Gaza’s hospitals ground to a halt after Israel choked essentials like fuel and food after Hamas’s attack on 7 October that killed 1,200 people in its southern regions.
After intense aerial bombing of north Gaza for weeks, Israeli troops are now carrying out a ground incursion with the aim to demolish the Hamas network and also rescue the 240 hostages that militants took that day.
According to the Hamas health ministry, over 11,000 people have reportedly died in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO), which has warned that Gazans might starve to death as fuel shortage crippled food production, said Friday that it wanted to set up field hospitals in the coastal strip.
WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territories Richard Peeperkorn, speaking to reporters in Geneva from Jerusalem via video link, said there were 3,500 beds available in the Gaza Strip before the war. That number has shrunk to 1,400, he added.
Medical care in surgeries is also severely impaired, with no more than 60 percent still in operation, he said.
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