GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – The occupying regime of Israel on Monday warned residents of Gaza’s largest refugee camp Jabalia and a nearby coastal camp to evacuate, as the military said it was expanding its invasion of additional neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip.”
Gaza’s health ministry said at least 12 Palestinians were martyred and dozens wounded when Israel fired into a hospital funded by Indonesia encircled by tanks.
Health officials said 700 patients along with staff were under Israeli fire. The Palestinian news agency WAFA said the facility in the northeast Gaza town of Beit Lahia had been hit by artillery rounds. Palestinian health officials said there were frantic efforts to evacuate civilians out of harm’s way.
Hospital staff denied there were any armed militants on the premises. “We had information earlier that tanks were besieging the Indonesian Hospital. Unfortunately..., communications there are almost cut,” Nahed Abu Taaema, director of Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, told Reuters.
“We are very concerned about the fate of our colleagues and the fate of wounded and patients as well as (displaced) people who may have still (been) sheltering there. No ambulances can reach them, and we’re afraid the wounded will die.”
Indonesia condemned what it called Israel’s “attack” on the hospital set up with Indonesian funding in 2016, saying it clearly violated international humanitarian laws, and urged countries close to Israel to get it to stop the violence.
Like all other health facilities in the northern half of Gaza, the Indonesian Hospital has largely ceased operations but is still sheltering patients, staff and displaced residents.
The occupying regime has ordered the total evacuation of the north, but thousands of civilians remain, many sheltering in hospitals. Food, fuel, medicines and drinking water have been running out across the enclave under Israel’s six-week-old siege.
In the south, where hundreds of thousands of Gazans who fled the north of the enclave are sheltering, at least 14 Palestinians were martyred in two Israeli strikes on houses in Rafah, according to Gaza health authorities.
Israeli airstrikes further martyred at least 12 Palestinians sheltering in an UNRWA school at the Bureij refugee camp.
Hisham Zaqout, a journalist for Al Jazeera Arabic, said that many more people have been wounded. Many of the families were looking for food or resting when the airstrike hit.
Israeli forces also bombed the Al-Kuwait school in north Gaza where hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering, according to the general manager of the Ministry of Health and local media.
The school is located in close proximity to the Indonesian Hospital which is currently surrounded by Israeli tanks. Photos shared online showed the school engulfed in flames.
Gaza’s government media office on Monday issued a statement saying that the humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave has worsened significantly.
It said shops and markets now have no basic food items, including flour, rice and canned foods. Bakeries have also been bombed by Israel.
There are growing fears that Gaza will be plunged into famine and disease will spread more quickly as the number of displaced people has caused overcrowding.
Cold weather and rain have made the situation unbearable for displaced Palestinians, with most of them unequipped for the winter months.
Witnesses also reported bouts of heavy fighting between Hamas fighters and Zionist forces trying to advance into north Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, home to 100,000 people.
Repeated Israeli bombardment of Jabalia, an urban extension of Gaza City that grew out of a camp for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, has martyred scores of civilians, Palestinian medics say.
The Zionist military issued a statement with video of airstrikes and troops going house-to-house in Gaza.
Since Oct. 7, at least 13,000 Palestinians have been martyred in the Gaza Strip, including at least 5,500 children, by unrelenting Israeli bombardment.
The United Nations says two thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless.
Another 20,000 Gazans, including increasing numbers of unaccompanied children, journeyed from the north to south, mainly by donkey cart or bus or on foot, on Sunday, and some 900,000 displaced people are now in UN shelters, the UN Humanitarian Office (OCHA) said in an update on Monday.
Thousands more displaced people were sleeping against the walls of shelters in the south, out in the open, with an average of one shower for 700 people and one toilet for 150, OCHA said.
The Zionist military claims its forces have seized wide areas of the north and northwest and east around Gaza City.
But Hamas and local witnesses say resistance fighters are waging guerrilla-style warfare in the warrens of the congested, urbanized north, including parts of Gaza City and the sprawling Jabalia and Beach refugee camps.
Sirens sounded on the Lebanese border after an attack from Hezbollah caused damage to an Israeli military base on Monday, according to Haaretz.