CAIRO: Israeli forces besieged hospitals and shelters for displaced people in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday as they stepped up their operations against Palestinian militants, residents and medics said.
Troops rounded up men and ordered women to leave the Jabalia historic refugee camp, they said. An Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed five people and wounded several others, medics said.
The UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said Israeli authorities were preventing humanitarian missions from reaching areas in the north of the Palestinian enclave with critical supplies, including medicine and food.
“People attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said on X.
Medics at the Indonesian Hospital told Reuters that Israeli troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting it ablaze. The fire reached hospital generators and caused a power outage, they added.
Health officials said they had refused orders by the Israeli army, which started a new incursion into the territory’s north 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 at least 18 people had been killed in Jabalia and eight elsewhere in Gaza in Israeli strikes.
The Israeli military said in a statement it was operating against “terrorists and terrorist infrastructure” in the Jabalia area.
Troops had helped thousands of civilians to evacuate safely through organized routes, it said. Israel was in contact with the international community and Gaza’s health care system to ensure hospital emergency services were operating, it said.
In the past day, troops had dismantled militant infrastructure and tunnel shafts and killed fighters in the Jabalia area, it said.
Israel has intensified its campaigns both in Gaza and Lebanon after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week had raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire talks to end more than a year of conflict.
It has vowed to eradicate the Hamas militants who formerly controlled Gaza and whose attack on Israel last year triggered the war, 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 destitute and desperate for food.
“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.”
Forced to live in toilets
Hadeel Obeid, a supervisor nurse at the Indonesian hospital, said they were running out of medical supplies, including sterile gauze and medications. The water supply has been cut off and there was no food for the fourth consecutive day, she told Reuters.
The United Nations said it had been unable to reach the three hospitals in northern Gaza.
The UN Human Rights Office accused Israeli forces of unlawful interference with humanitarian assistance and issuing orders that we causing forced displacement. It said their conduct “may be causing the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza’s northernmost governate through death and displacement.”
UNRWA’S Lazzarini said injured people were lying without care in hospitals that had been hit.
“UNRWA remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets,” he said.
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 by positioning tanks in nearby Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya towns and ordering residents to leave.
Israeli officials said evacuation orders were aimed at separating Hamas fighters from civilians and denied there was any systematic plan to clear out civilians. 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” to force people to leave northern Gaza.
The Hamas armed wing said fighters attacked forces there with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire, and detonated 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.
The slain Sinwar was one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7, 2003, cross-border attack on Israeli communities that killed around 1,200 people, with about 253 more taken back to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent war has killed more than 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted dead thought to lie under the rubble, Gaza health authorities say.