MONITORING (SW) – An Israeli air strike on Tuesday killed at least 500 Palestinians at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City crammed with patients and displaced people, health ministry in the besieged enclave said.
The strike was the bloodiest single incident in Gaza since Israel launched an unrelenting bombing campaign against the densely populated territory in retaliation for the Oct 7 Hamas attack.
It took place on the eve of a visit by US President Joe Biden to Israel to show support for Israel, reported Dawn.
In a statement, the health ministry in the Gaza Strip said there are “hundreds of victims” under the rubble of a Gaza hospital compound that was hit by Israeli bombing, Al Jazeera reported.
Gaza’s Hamas government described the attack as a “war crime”. It said the bombing mostly killed people left homeless by Israel bombardments, and that the dead included patients, women and children.
“There are scores of dismembered and crushed bodies, baths of blood,” said Izzat El-Reshiq, a senior Hamas member.
Video on social media showed several full ambulances arriving at another Gaza hospital carrying people injured at hospital. One man was staggering, bleeding heavily from the head. A boy was being carried on a stretcher.
Soon after the deadly strikes, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas canceled his scheduled meeting with the US president, Reuters reported quoting a Palestinian official.
Abbas also declared three days of mourning following the Israeli bombing, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini called the bombing at Al-Maghazi refugee camp, also in central Gaza, “outrageous” and warned the death toll would likely rise.
“It again shows a flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians. No place is safe in Gaza anymore, not even UNRWA facilities,” he added.
The Israeli military denied responsibility for the blast at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital, suggesting the hospital was hit by a failed rocket inside Gaza.
“An analysis of IDF operational systems indicates that a barrage of rockets was fired by terrorists in Gaza, passing in close proximity to the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza at the time it was hit,” a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said.
Taking to social media platform X, World Health Organisation Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned today’s deadly hospital bombing in Gaza. He called for the “immediate protection of civilians” and for Israel’s “evacuation orders to be reversed”.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk termed today’s incident “totally unacceptable”.
“Hospitals are sacrosanct & must be protected at all cost,” he said and called on all the states with influence to do everything in their power to end the violence and killings.
“This attack is unprecedented in scale,” said Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative for the West Bank and Gaza. “We have seen consistent attacks on healthcare in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Peeperkorn said there so far have been 51 attacks against healthcare facilities in Gaza, with 15 health workers killed and 27 injured.
Ahmed Al-Mandhari, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said there were patients, healthcare workers and internally displaced people in the hospital when it was struck.
“The hospital was one of 20 in the north of the Gaza Strip facing evacuation orders from the Israeli military,” he said.
“The order for evacuation has been impossible to carry out given the current insecurity, critical condition of many patients, and lack of ambulances, staff, health system bed capacity, and alternative shelter for those displaced,” he added.
Prior to Tuesday’s bombing, the Palestinian health ministry said 3,000 people, mostly children, have been killed in Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip since Oct 7.
More than 12,500 others have been wounded since Israel started bombarding Gaza in retaliation for Hamas attacks in Israel which killed more than 1,400 people. The ministry added that 61 Palestinians were also killed while 1,250 were wounded in the occupied West Bank during the same period.
Israel has vowed to annihilate the Hamas group after its fighters killed 1,300 people — the deadliest single day in Israel’s 75-year history. It now prepares to escalate a ground offensive in response to the Hamas blitz.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for broad international support in the country’s war against Hamas.
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