Israel attacks southern Gaza after evacuation order
Israeli forces launched an attack on southern Gaza overnight, targeting areas in Khan Younis from which rockets were fired into Israel a day earlier, the military said Tuesday.
The strikes came after the Israeli military ordered new evacuations from eastern Khan Younis and the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Such orders usually indicate that the military is planning a ground assault, but the military did not say Tuesday whether it would send troops to Khan Younis, an area its forces entered earlier in the war but have since abandoned.
An announcement of evacuation posted on social media late Monday night by Israeli army spokesman for Arab media Avichay Adraee, saying people in designated areas should “evacuate immediately” for their safety. That area includes the European Gaza Hospital, leading to dozens of patients and medical staff fleeing there.
Doctors at the hospital, near Khan Younis, said Monday night that they had also received orders to evacuate. The Israeli military said in a statement Tuesday morning that it had “no plans to evacuate the European hospital.”
Source: Israeli military announcements
By Leanne Abraham
Large parts of Khan Younis were leveled in a massive assault early this year, after which Israeli forces withdrew, claiming to have destroyed Hamas battalions there. But Israeli commanders have repeatedly sent troops back into areas they had supposedly secured to crush emerging Hamas factions.
The evacuation order was given after the Israeli military reported that at least 20 rockets had been fired into Israel from southern Gaza. The military said it had responded with artillery fire, hitting the sources of the rockets.
Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced during the war, with many forced to flee repeatedly due to evacuation orders or to escape the fighting.
The United Nations condemned Monday’s evacuation order. “It shows once again that no place in Gaza is safe,” said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters in New Yorkadding that the announcement underscored the need for a ceasefire. “It is another stop in this deadly cycle that the people of Gaza have to endure regularly,” he added.
Dr. Mohammed Harara, an emergency physician at the European Gaza Hospital, shared videos with The New York Times on Monday showing injured patients being transferred to stretchers and others being wheeled out of the hospital, with rooms thrown into disarray by the hasty evacuations. He estimated there were about 600 patients in the hospital and said he was still there, working on the evacuations.
In a message sent early Tuesday morning, Dr. Harara said he heard shelling nearby and that wounded patients were coming to the hospital despite evacuation orders.
A doctor at Nasser Hospital, about 10 kilometres away, reported “mass chaos” and fistfights at the emergency room as ambulances arrived with patients from the European Gaza Hospital, who had to compete for care with incoming patients from the region.
The doctor, Hina Cheema, a Pakistani-American on a humanitarian mission in Nasser, said the evacuations were complicated because the roads in the area had been largely destroyed and were now congested with fleeing people, and that unstable patients were at risk of dying during transport. The drive from European Gaza Hospital to Nasser takes about 30 minutes under current conditions, both she and Dr. Harara said.
There were about 300 to 400 beds in the European Gaza hospital, said Shéhérazade Kaoues, a spokeswoman for FAJR Scientifica U.S. nonprofit that organizes humanitarian medical missions to Gaza. But there were many more patients and displaced people seeking shelter there before the evacuation order came, she said.
Ms Kaoues said her organisation had three foreign medical volunteers in European Gaza, but they had all been evacuated to a safe house.
In May, a group of about 16 international health workers were trapped in the European Gaza Hospital for about two weeks after Israel seized the Rafah border crossing near Egypt. There were no evacuation orders for the hospital at the time, said Adam Hamawy, an American doctor who worked at the hospital at the time. He wrote to President Biden about the grave danger in Gaza, saying that no one was safe, including civilians and humanitarian workers.
One of the medical workers stranded in European Gaza in May, Dr. Mohammed Tahir, is an orthopedic and peripheral nerve surgeon from Britain who is now on his second medical mission with Fajr Scientific to the European Gaza Hospital. On Monday he said he had been evacuated to a safe house. In a video message Posted on social media and shared with The Times, he said: “My feelings are one of disbelief, heartbreak, sadness. I have literally left my patients behind in the EGH. I don’t know who is going to look after them.”
He described working with patients with complicated injuries, including bone infections, before his evacuation and said he was uncertain about their fate. “These people get sick very quickly and can even die within a few days,” he said.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed to the reporting.
