Israeli strikes this weekend on what’s considered north Gaza’s main hospital have resulted in about a dozen wounded staff, including the barely operational medical facility’s director, amid the region’s worsening humanitarian catastrophe.
For 50 days, Israeli forces have incessantly attacked the territory’s northernmost region, which includes the towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, walling the area off from the rest of Gaza in a way that has blocked most humanitarian aid from entering, rendering the north virtually uninhabitable.
Like the rest of Gaza, the Israeli military continues to attack the north’s health care system, including Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, where only two doctors remain. An overnight drone strike on the facility damaged its generator and oxygen supply, as well as seriously injured hospital chief Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya while he was sitting in his office.
Speaking from a patient bed at his own hospital’s intensive care unit, Abu Safiya said he was hit in the back and thigh by a kind of bomb he’d never seen before: a quadcopter drone containing tiny pieces of metal shrapnel that “can barely be seen by the naked eye.”
“Right now, I’m in need of an urgent consultation with a vascular surgeon due to the intensity of bleeding in the site of injury,” he said in a recording shared by the Gaza Health Ministry’s director general, Dr. Muneer Alboursh.
“There are six pieces of shrapnel that penetrated the area of the thigh, and I believe they caused a tear in the blood vessels and veins,” Abu Safiya continued. “We are in critical need for [Israel] to allow entry of medical and surgical delegations in order for me to get treated and for other people to get treated.”
Kamal Adwan Hospital has faced constant, intense bombardment by Israeli forces who claim that Hamas militants hide among patients, something Palestinians, aid workers and media investigations have denied. The hospital has faced daily attacks for the past week, in what Abu Safiya described as “the same scene [that] repeats and worsens.”
Abu Safiya has tried to provide near-daily updates on the worsening situation at Kamal Adwan and war-ravaged North Gaza, where food, means of communication, and medicine are scarce. As of Friday, the hospital had 85 injured patients, eight critical cases in intensive care, 14 children in the pediatric ward and four newborns in the neonatal unit. It’s unclear how the recent destruction of the fuel generator and oxygen supply will impact current patients.
Israel allegedly transferred about 17 patients and caregivers on Saturday from Kamal Adwan to other hospitals in Gaza, according to COGAT, the Israeli government agency in charge of humanitarian aid in the territory. The Sunday statement made no mention of the Israeli military’s strikes on the hospital.
Just last month, Abu Safiya’s 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in nearby Jabalia after surviving injuries from Israeli snipers on the military’s first raid last December on Kamal Adwan. Soldiers have also rounded up most of the hospital chief’s colleagues in detention camps and prevented Gaza Civil Defense workers from bringing ambulances to the north.
“What is clearly happening is that the occupation wants to expel us from this health care facility,” Abu Safiya said.
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Abu Safiya is among the many Palestinian health care workers who have been targeted since Israel launched its current siege on Gaza in response to the October 2023 deadly Hamas attack. In addition to indiscriminately bombing the territory of 2.3 million Palestinians, Israeli forces are also destroying the land and its people by completely collapsing the health care system.
For more than a year, soldiers have invaded hospitals, abducted and killed medical workers, prevented sufficient medical aid teams from entering the territory, and spread hunger and disease via an ongoing aid blockade and the destruction of water and sewage systems.
“These people, they target everyone. But I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us,” Abu Safiya said. “We are up till now appealing to the world and will keep asking, with the faint hope that there are people with a living conscience still out there.”