GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike hit a hospital Sunday, killing at least seven people, while Israel said it had targeted militants at the no longer functioning facility.
“Seven martyrs and several injured people, including critical cases, have been recovered following the Israeli strike on the upper floor of Al-Wafaa Hospital in central Gaza City,” a civil defense agency statement said.
Israel’s military said it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting members of Hamas’s aerial defense unit operating from a “command and control center in a building that served in the past as the Al-Wafaa hospital.”
“The building does not currently serve as a hospital,” the military said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the hospital was still in use.
“The Al-Wafaa Hospital is partially operational, providing care to patients with physical disabilities,” the ministry’s director general, Munir Al-Barsh, told AFP.
“The hospital had been rehabilitated and was getting ready to receive patients. Had it not been targeted by Israeli shelling today, it would have been ready to fully reopen in the next few days,” he said.
The strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, an assault the World Health Organization reported left the facility empty of patients and staff.
The military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant.
Since October 6, Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territory have focused on northern Gaza, where it says its land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
However, the military has also carried out air strikes and shelling in other areas of Gaza as it presses on with its campaign against the militants.

DEIR AL-BALAH: A fourth infant has died of hypothermia in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by nearly 15 months of war are huddled in tents along the rainy, windswept coast as winter arrives.
Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said. The baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Their father said the twins were born one month premature and spent just a day in the nursery at the hospital, which like other health centers in Gaza has been overwhelmed and is only partially functioning.
He said medics told their mother to keep the newborns warm, but it was impossible because they live in a tent and temperatures regularly drop below 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at night.
“We are eight people, and we only have four blankets,” Al-Batran said as he cradled his son’s pale body. He described drops of dew seeping through the tent cover overnight. “Look at his color because the cold. Do you see how frozen he is?”
Children, some of them barefoot, stood outdoors and watched him mourn. The shrouded infant was laid at the feet of an imam, barely larger than his shoes. After prayers, the imam took off his ankle-length coat and wrapped it around the father.
At least three other babies have died from the cold in recent weeks, according to local health officials.
A Palestinian woman is killed at home in the West Bank
A Palestinian woman was shot and killed in her home in the volatile West Bank town of Jenin, where the Palestinian Authority is carrying out a rare campaign against militants.
The family of Shatha Al-Sabbagh, a 22-year-old journalism student, said she was killed by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces late Saturday while she was with her mother and two small children. They said there were no militants in the area at the time.
A statement from the Palestinian security forces said she was shot by “outlaws” — the term it uses for local militants battling Israeli forces in recent years. The security forces condemned the shooting and vowed to investigate it.
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, largely because it cooperates with Israel on security matters, even as Israel accuses it of incitement and of generally turning a blind eye to militancy.
In a statement, the Al-Sabbagh family accused the Palestinian security forces of having become “repressive tools that practice terrorism against their own people instead of protecting their dignity and standing up to the (Israeli) occupation.”
The Hamas militant group also blamed the security forces and noted that Al-Sabbagh was the sister of one of its fighters who was killed in a battle with Israeli troops last year.
Later on Sunday, hundreds of people took part in a demonstration in Jenin in support of the Palestinian security forces. The rally was organized by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian security forces launched a rare operation earlier this month in Jenin that they said was aimed at restoring law and order, while critics accuse the authority of aiding the occupation.
Violence has flared in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state.