Over 30 infants in critical condition in Gaza hospital — UN

A United Nations team has said that 291 patients were left at Gaza’s largest hospital after Israeli troops had others forcefully displaced.

Those left included 32 babies in extremely critical condition, trauma patients with severely infected wounds and others with spinal injuries who were unable to move.

The team was able to tour Al Shifa Hospital for an hour after about 2,500 displaced people, mobile patients and medical staff left the sprawling compound Saturday morning, said the World Health Organization, which led the mission.

“Patients and health staff with whom they spoke were terrified for their safety and health, and pleaded for evacuation,” the agency said on Sunday, describing Shifa as a death zone.

It said more teams will attempt to reach Al Shifa in the coming days to try to evacuate the patients to southern Gaza, where hospitals are also overwhelmed.

'Snipers were everywhere'

Israeli troops are staying in the hospital. Israel’s military has been searching Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital for a Hamas command centre that it alleges is located under the facility — a claim Hamas and hospital staff deny.

Saturday's mass departure was portrayed by Israel as voluntary, but described by some of those leaving as a forced exodus.

“We left at gunpoint,” Mahmoud Abu Auf told The Associated Press by phone after he and his family left the crowded hospital. “Tanks and snipers were everywhere inside and outside.” He said he saw Israeli troops detain three men.

Elsewhere in northern Gaza, dozens of people were killed in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp when what witnesses described as an Israeli air strike hit a crowded UN shelter in the main combat zone. It caused massive destruction in the camp's Fakhoura school, said wounded survivors 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.

AP photos from a local hospital showed more than 20 bodies wrapped in bloodstained sheets.

'Horrifying' scenes

The Israeli military, which had warned Jabaliya residents and others in a social media post in Arabic to leave, said only that its troops were active in the area “with the aim of hitting terrorists.”

“Receiving horrifying images and footage of scores of people killed and injured in another UNRWA school sheltering thousands of displaced," Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said on X, formerly Twitter.

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.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel's forces have begun operating in eastern Gaza City while continuing its mission in western areas.

Almost all hospitals are defunctioned

The UN team visiting after the expulsion order said 25 medical staff remained, along with the patients.

The World Health Organization said that in the next 24–72 hours, pending guarantees of safe passage, more missions were being arranged to evacuate to the Nasser Medical Complex and the European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza.

Twenty-five of Gaza's hospitals aren't functioning due to a lack of fuel, damage and other problems, and the other 11 are only partially operational, according to the World Health Organization.