Israel’s military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny.
Strip Patients, staff and displaced people departed Gaza’s largest hospital Saturday, health officials said, leaving behind only Israeli forces and a skeleton crew to care for those too sick to move.
The exodus in Gaza City came the same day internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip, ending a telecommunications blackout that forced the United Nations to shut down critical humanitarian aid deliveries because it was unable to coordinate its convoys.
Dozens of people were killed in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp on Saturday when what witnesses described as an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded U.N. shelter in the main combat zone of northern Gaza. It caused massive destruction in the camp’s Fakhoura school, with dozens of people seen lying motionless, said Ahmed Radwan and Yassin Sharif.
“The scenes were horrifying. Corpses of women and children were on the ground. Others were screaming for help,” Radwan said by phone.
The Israeli military, which had warned Jabaliya residents and others in a social media post in Arabic to leave, had no immediate comment. It rarely comments on individual strikes, saying only that it targets Hamas while trying to minimize harm to civilians.
“Receiving horrifying images & footage of scores of people killed and injured in another UNRWA school sheltering thousands of displaced in the north of the Gaza Strip. These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer,” Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said on X, formerly Twitter.
Attacks also continued in southern Gaza. An Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing at least 26 Palestinians, according to a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken.
Israel’s military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny — and urging the several thousand people still there to leave.
On Saturday, the military said it had been asked by the hospital’s director to help those who would like to leave do so by a secure route. The military said it did not order any evacuation, and that medical personnel were being allowed to remain in the hospital to support patients who cannot be moved.
