LAST UPDATE | 13 Nov 2023
US PRESIDENT JOE Biden today urged Israel to protect Gaza’s main hospital as heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas raged around the complex.
“It’s my hope and expectation that there will be less intrusive action relative to the hospital,” Biden told reporters in the Oval Office when asked if he had expressed concerns to Israel on the issue.
“The hospital must be protected.”
Biden, who spoke as he was signing a women’s health research initiative alongside First Lady Jill Biden, added that he was “in contact with the Israelis” on the matter.
He said that a deal for the “release of prisoners” was still being negotiated with the help of the Gulf state of Qatar.
A surgeon with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the medical charity group, said that hundreds of people were stranded in the Al-Shifa hospital complex enduring “inhuman” conditions.
Israel argues that its Hamas enemies built their military headquarters under the Al-Shifa hospital – a charge Hamas denies – while UN agencies and doctors in the facility warned that a lack of generator fuel was claiming lives, including those of infants.
The World Health Organization in the Palestinian territories earlier today said that at least 2,300 people – patients, health workers and people fleeing fighting – were inside the crippled Al-Shifa facility.
The Israeli army has pushed on with its military campaign, but it is facing intense international pressure to minimize civilian suffering amid its massive air and ground operations, which Hamas authorities say have killed 11,180 people, including 4,609 children.
Fuel shortages
the hospitals in northern Gaza have been forced out of service amid fuel shortages and intense combat, with the death toll inside the territory’s largest facility rising, the Hamas-run health ministry said today.
Witnesses reported intense overnight air strikes, with tanks and armoured vehicles just meters from the gate of the sprawling Al-Shifa compound at the heart of the Gaza City, now an urban war zone.
The Hamas government’s deputy health minister Youssef Abu Rish said the death toll inside Al-Shifa rose to 27 adult intensive care patients and seven babies since the weekend as the facility suffered fuel shortages.
Gaza has been reliant on generators for over a month after Israel cut off power supplies following the October 7 attack and the besieged territory’s only power plant ran out of fuel.
Abu Rish told AFP all hospitals in the north of the embattled territory were “out of service”.
The World Health Organization in the Palestinian Territories said early Monday that at least 2,300 people – patients, health workers and people fleeing fighting – were inside the crippled Al-Shifa.
“There are dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded that no one can get to. Ambulances are at a standstill because they get shot at when they go out,” hospital director Muhammad Abu Selmiya said.
Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh today called on the European Union and the United Nations to “parachute aid” into the Gaza Strip.
“I call on the United Nations and the European Union to parachute aid into the Gaza Strip, especially the north,” he said, referring to the area where fighting is most intense.
Israel is facing intense international pressure to minimise civilian suffering amid a massive air and ground operation that Hamas authorities say has already killed 11,240 people, including 4,630 children.
Foreign officials like EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell have urged Israel to show “maximum restraint”, while condemning Hamas for using “hospitals and civilians as human shields.”
Israel’s military said it would observe a “self-evacuation corridor” today, allowing people to move from Al-Shifa southward, but admitted the area was still the scene of “intense battles.”
The area of fighting “currently includes the area surrounding the Shifa hospital but not the hospital itself”, a spokesperson for the Israel Defence Forces told AFP.
Tens of thousands of Gazans have already fled from the north of the territory under Israeli orders.
But it is unclear what, if any, provisions there would be for the sick and injured to be transported from Al-Shifa.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned today its operations in war-torn Gaza would shut down within two days due to fuel shortages as fighting rages between Israel and Hamas.
“The humanitarian operation in Gaza will grind to a halt in the next 48 hours as no fuel is allowed to enter Gaza,” UNRWA’s Gaza chief Thomas White wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The Israeli army said its ground soldiers had hand-delivered 300 litres of fuel to the hospital “for urgent medical purposes”.
The military shared grainy night-time footage of combat troops hauling jerry cans, leaving a dozen or more outside a building.
AFP was unable to independently verify the footage, or Israel’s claim that Hamas “forbade the hospital from taking it.”
Only a handful of trucks carrying fuel had been let into Gaza since 7 October, with Israel concerned fuel deliveries would be used by Hamas militants.
Al-Shifa director Mohammad Abu Salmiya told journalists the Israeli claims were “lies”.
The 300 litres the army said had been delivered would power generators for “no more than quarter of an hour” anyway, Abu Salmiya said.
The EU’s humanitarian aid chief today called for “meaningful” pauses in the fighting in Gaza and urgent deliveries of fuel to keep hospitals working in the territory.
“It is urgent to define and respect humanitarian pauses,” Janez Lenarcic, European Commissioner for Crisis Management, said at a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Brussels.
“Fuel needs to get in. As you could see, more than half of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip stopped working, primarily because of lack of fuel, and fuel is desperately needed.”
The EU’s 27 countries issued a statement yesterday saying hospitals “must be protected” and condemning Hamas for using the medical facilities and civilians as “human shields”.
The bloc demanded “immediate humanitarian pauses” to allow desperately needed aid into the besieged territory.
“These pauses have to be meaningful,” Lenarcic said.
“First of all, they have to be announced well in advance of the implementation so organisations can prepare to exploit them. Second, they have to be clearly defined time-wise.”
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell insisted that “Gaza needs more aid from any point of view”.
“Water, fuel, food. This aid is available, is in the border waiting to come in,” he said.
Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said that hospitals in Gaza should not be turned into “battlefields”.
“Patients who are in intensive care units have no chance,” he said.
“There is no more oxygen, there is no more water, there are no more medicines. So these people are going to die.”
Dwindling supplies
Inside the hospital, AFP last week witnessed the sick and injured on gurneys that packed corridor walls.
The courtyard of the emergency ward was dotted with people and piles of rubbish lay uncollected.
Some of the thousands displaced by the fighting camped at the facility using make-shift kitchens and what few supplies they had.
Across Gaza City at the Al-Quds hospital the picture was also said to be dire, with the Palestinian Red Crescent warning it was now out of service due to a lack of generator fuel.
Twenty of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “no longer functioning”, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency.
Almost 1.6 million people – about two-thirds of Gaza’s population – have been internally displaced since 7 October, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out calls for the ceasefire, saying Hamas must first release the estimated 240 hostages taken on 7 October.
Israelis are still stunned by the worst attack in their country’s history and preoccupied with the fate of those still missing.
A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute showed many Israelis back talks with Hamas to secure the release of hostages, but believe fighting should not be halted.
Netanyahu told US media that “there could be” a deal to free the hostages, but stopped short of providing any details.
“The less I say about it, the more I’ll increase the chances that it materialises,” he told NBC.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC there has been “active negotiation” on a potential deal but kept mum on any details, while a Palestinian official in Gaza accused Israel of dragging its feet.
“Netanyahu is responsible for the delay and obstacles in reaching a preliminary agreement on the release of several prisoners,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
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