Israeli Forces Storm Shelters, Detain Men, as North Gaza Raid Deepens

Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas north of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2024. In recent days, the military has launched an intense ground and air assault in northern Gaza, particularly in and around the city of Jabalia. (AFP)
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas north of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2024. In recent days, the military has launched an intense ground and air assault in northern Gaza, particularly in and around the city of Jabalia. (AFP)
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Israeli Forces Storm Shelters, Detain Men, as North Gaza Raid Deepens

Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas north of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2024. In recent days, the military has launched an intense ground and air assault in northern Gaza, particularly in and around the city of Jabalia. (AFP)
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas north of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2024. In recent days, the military has launched an intense ground and air assault in northern Gaza, particularly in and around the city of Jabalia. (AFP)

Israeli forces blew up homes and besieged schools and shelters for displaced people on Monday as they deepened their operations in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, residents and medics said.

They also rounded up men and ordered women to leave the camp, they said.

Medics at the Indonesian Hospital told Reuters that Israeli troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting the facility ablaze. The fire reached the hospital generators and caused a power outage, they added.

Health officials said they refused orders by the Israeli army, which began a new incursion into the north of the Palestinian territory over two weeks ago, to evacuate the three hospitals in the area or leave the patients unattended.

Troops remained outside the hospital but did not enter, they said. Medics at a second hospital, Kamal Adwan, reported heavy Israeli fire near the hospital at night.

"The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one can enter or leave the hospital," said one nurse at the Indonesian Hospital, who asked not to be named.

Palestinian health officials said 18 people had been killed in Jabalia and eight elsewhere in Gaza in Israeli strikes.

The Israeli military said troops were continuing ground operations across the Gaza Strip. It said in a statement that over the past day, troops had dismantled militant infrastructure and tunnel shafts and killed fighters in the Jabalia area. It did not comment on the immediate situation regarding the hospitals and camps.

Israel has intensified its campaigns both in Gaza and Lebanon days after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire talks to end more than a year of conflict.

Israel has vowed to eradicate the Hamas movement who formerly controlled Gaza, but in doing so has laid waste to much of the territory and killed tens of thousands of people. More than 1.9 million people have been left homeless amid a humanitarian crisis.

RUNNING OUT

Hadeel Obeid, a supervisor nurse at the Indonesian hospital, where 32 patients are currently being treated, said they were running out of medical supplies.

"Sterile gauze is going to finish and there are no medications to give them," she told Reuters via a chat app.

Obeid said the water supply has been cut off and there was food for the fourth consecutive day. She appealed to international organizations to take action to save the wounded.

The United Nations said it had been unable to reach the three hospitals in northern Gaza. It demanded access to allow aid into northern Gaza areas.

The UN Human Rights Office said it was "increasingly concerned that the manner in which the Israeli military is conducting hostilities in North Gaza, along with unlawful interference with humanitarian assistance and orders that are leading to forced displacement, may be causing the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza's northernmost governate through death and displacement".

Israel says it is getting large quantities of humanitarian supplies into Gaza with land deliveries and airdrops. It also says it has facilitated the evacuation of patients from the Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Palestinians say no aid entered northern Gaza areas where the operation is active.

Residents and medics said Israeli forces had tightened their siege on Jabalia, the largest of the enclave's eight historic refugee camps, which it encircled by sending tanks to the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya and issuing evacuation orders to residents.

"We are facing death by bombs, by thirst and hunger," said Raed, a resident of Jabalia camp. "Jabalia is being wiped out and there is no witness to the crime, the world is blinding its eyes,"

Israeli officials said evacuation orders were aimed at separating Hamas fighters from civilians and denied there was any systematic plan to clear civilians out of Jabalia or other northern areas. It said forces operating in northern Gaza killed scores of Hamas gunmen and dismantled infrastructure

Hamas accused Israel of carrying out acts of "genocide and ethnic cleansing" against the people of northern Gaza to force them to leave.

The Hamas armed wing said fighters attacked forces there with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire, and detonated already planted bombs against troops inside tanks and stationed in houses.

Elsewhere in the enclave, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip and four in two separate strikes in Gaza City, medics said.

Sinwar was one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7, 2003, cross-border attack on Israeli communities that killed around 1,200 people, with another 253 taken back to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel's subsequent war has devastated Gaza, killing more than 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted dead thought to lie under the rubble, Gaza health authorities say.



Israel Raids a Gaza Hospital and Its Strike on a Home Kills 13 Children

22 October 2024, Palestinian Territories, Gaza: Displaced Palestinians flee with their families and belongings after an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza by the Israeli military amid an Israeli military operation, in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. (dpa)
22 October 2024, Palestinian Territories, Gaza: Displaced Palestinians flee with their families and belongings after an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza by the Israeli military amid an Israeli military operation, in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. (dpa)
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Israel Raids a Gaza Hospital and Its Strike on a Home Kills 13 Children

22 October 2024, Palestinian Territories, Gaza: Displaced Palestinians flee with their families and belongings after an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza by the Israeli military amid an Israeli military operation, in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. (dpa)
22 October 2024, Palestinian Territories, Gaza: Displaced Palestinians flee with their families and belongings after an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza by the Israeli military amid an Israeli military operation, in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. (dpa)

Israeli strikes on residential areas in southern Gaza killed 38 people on Friday, Palestinian health officials said, including 13 children from the same extended family.

In northern Gaza, health officials reported that Israeli forces had raided Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the few medical facilities still functioning in the area. Israel has renewed its offensive against Hamas in the north in recent weeks, and aid groups are sounding the alarm over dire humanitarian conditions.

In Lebanon, Israeli strikes on the country's southeast killed three journalists working for news outlets that are considered to be aligned with the Lebanese group Hezbollah and its patron, Iran.

Israeli strikes kill dozens in Khan Younis

The Health Ministry in Gaza reported that Israeli airstrikes and shelling pounded the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 38 people and wounding dozens.

The Israeli military, which has said that troops are targeting Hamas fighters in the southern town, did not respond to questions about Friday's attack on several residential buildings. Palestinians said the neighborhood was hit with no warning.

Footage from the Palestinian Civil Defense showed rescuers pulling the bloodied bodies of nine children from the al-Farra family out of the ruins.

The victims were taken to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis as well as to the European Hospital, where records showed at least 15 members of the al-Farra family had been killed. Six members of the Abdeen family were also killed, health officials reported.

Saleh al-Farra, who lost his 17-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister in the attack, said that shaking from the bombardment sent his family members running to the middle of the house for shelter. The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the rubble of what had been his home.

“I started screaming and screaming until my brother and father came, and they started trying to pull me out,” he said. “I didn't know anything about anyone.”

Israeli forces intensify operations around northern Gaza hospital

In response to reports that it had stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, the Israeli military said only that it was “operating in the area” of the hospital based on intelligence that indicated the presence of fighters and militant infrastructure.

The pediatric hospital is one of the area’s three medical facilities to remain somewhat operational after more than a year of war. Since Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the hospitals amid its renewed assault against Hamas fighters in northern Gaza, doctors have warned that dire shortages of food, medicine and other supplies had triggered a humanitarian emergency.

The Gaza-based Ministry of Health reported that Israeli troops on Friday rounded up medical staff and displaced people sheltering at the hospital and forced the men to strip, a common practice that Israel says is meant to ensure detainees do not conceal weapons. The ministry said some Palestinians were detained, without specifying how many.

The Palestinian Civil Defense said that Israeli forces arrested two of its workers, including a local rescue coordinator and a firefighter. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the arrests.

The World Health Organization said on Friday it lost touch with staff at Kamal Adwan, where some had been the night before to deliver supplies and help transfer patients to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

"This development is deeply disturbing given the number of patients being served and people sheltering there," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on social media platform X about the loss of communication.

Kamal Adwan Hospital Director Hussam Abu Safiya could not be reached on Friday. In voice messages sent late Thursday, Abu Safiya claimed that the hospital had come under Israeli tank fire. The Israeli military denied that a tank had fired at the hospital.

“Patients are still lying on the floors of the reception and emergency areas, with many in critical condition. There are no resources, supplies, or specialists to save these children’s lives,” Abu Safiya said in his voice message. “We appeal to the world to intervene and preserve our hospitals.”

The United Nations has said hundreds of thousands of people have been trapped in northern Gaza with little food or supplies as Israeli forces close in on the town of Jabaliya. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, said Friday that Israeli military actions in the north “risk emptying the area of all Palestinians."

Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — in which Palestinian fighters killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged another 250 back into Gaza — many hospitals in Gaza have come under attack. Kamal Adwan was besieged and raided by Israeli forces a year ago.

The Israeli military accuses Hamas fighters of using hospitals, and tunnels beneath them, as bases. Hamas and Palestinian doctors have repeatedly denied that claim.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were combatants but says women and children make up more than half the fatalities. The Israeli military says it has killed over 17,000 fighters, without providing evidence.

Israel’s military announced Friday that three more soldiers were killed in Gaza this week, without providing details. That brings the number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza since the start of its ground invasion to 359.