CAIRO: Two Israeli missiles hit a building inside a main Gaza hospital on Sunday (Apr 13), destroying the emergency and reception department and damaging other structures, medics said.
Health officials at the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital evacuated the patients from the building after one person said he received a call from someone who identified himself with Israeli security shortly before the attack took place.
No casualties were reported, according to the civil emergency service.
Israel made no comment on the strike.
Images circulating on social media, which Reuters could not immediately authenticate, showed dozens of displaced families leaving the place. Some of them dragging sick relatives on hospital beds.
In its statement, the Hamas-run government media office condemned the attack as a “heinous and filthy crime”, saying that Israel “deliberately destroyed and rendered out of service 34 hospitals as part of a systematic plan to dismantle what remains of the healthcare sector in the Gaza Strip”.
Hospitals, protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on Oct 7, 2023.
In October 2023, an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital killed hundreds of people. Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli air strike for the blast. Israel said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which denied blame.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of having tunnels under hospitals and using the medical facilities as command centres to plan and carry out attacks against the army and Israel, a charge denied by the Palestinian militant group.
On Mar 28, the World Health Organization said 22 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were partially functional.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday at least 1,563 Palestinians had been killed since Mar 18 when a ceasefire collapsed, taking the overall death toll since the war began to 50,933.
