This handout satellite picture released by Maxar Technologies on November 12, 2023, shows the damage arround the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City's al-Rimal district. (Photo by Satellite image 2023 Maxar Technologies / AFP)
Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip: Thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee from some of the last shelters in northern Gaza while stranding critically wounded patients, including newborns, and their caregivers with dwindling supplies and no electricity, health officials said Monday.
As Israeli troops encircled Gaza's Shifa Hospital over the weekend, thousands fled, while hundreds of patients and displaced people remained, according to officials. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Shifa "is not functioning as a hospital anymore.”
Another hospital in Gaza City, Al-Quds, was forced to shut down Sunday because it ran out of fuel. The Palestinian Red Crescent, which operates the facility, said Israeli forces are stationed nearby and that preparations are being made to evacuate some 6,000 patients, medics and displaced people.
For Palestinians, Shifa evokes the suffering of civilians. Thousands of people displaced by airstrikes that have destroyed entire city blocks have sought shelter in its darkened corridors. Doctors running low on supplies perform surgery there on war-wounded patients, including children, without anesthesia. One medic shared a photo showing nine premature babies in a shared crib.
A U.N. health official said many displaced families and patients with moderate injuries fled the hospital over the weekend. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters, said most of the remaining patients could only be relocated with ambulances and other special procedures.
Mohammed Zaqout, the director of hospitals in Gaza, said those who remain include about 650 patients, 500 medical staff and around 2,500 displaced Palestinians sheltering inside hospital buildings. That's down from more than 20,000 people reported to be at the hospital on Saturday by the Health Ministry in Gaza.
The ministry said 32 patients, including three babies, have died since the hospital's emergency generator ran out of fuel on Saturday. It said 36 babies, as well as other patients, are at risk of dying because there is no way to power life-saving medical equipment.
Medical Aid for Palestinians, a U.K.-based charity that has supported Shifa's neonatal intensive care unit, said transferring critically ill infants is complex. "With ambulances unable to reach the hospital... and no hospital with capacity to receive them, there is no indication of how this can be done safely,"
CEO Melanie Ward said. She said the only option was to pause the fighting and allow in fuel.
Saib Abu Hashish said he has been trapped on the ground floor of his family home along with 27 others in Gaza City. They haven't left the house in three days and are running out of food and water. He said their neighbors attempted to escape the area on Sunday, but Israeli forces opened fire on them.
"We want to leave but we can’t because of the bombing,” he said by phone. "If we survive the bombing, we will die from hunger.”
More than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
Health officials, many of whom work out of Shifa, have not updated that toll since Friday because of the difficulty of collecting information.
