Israeli forces struck southern Gaza overnight, targeting the Khan Yunis area where rockets were fired into Israel the previous day, the army said on Tuesday.
The attack came after the Israeli army ordered new withdrawals from Khan Yunis in eastern Gaza and the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Such orders usually indicate the army is planning a ground offensive, but the army did not say Tuesday whether it would send troops to Khan Yunis, where it advanced but retreated earlier in the war.
An evacuation advisory posted on social media late Monday by Israeli military spokesman for Arab media Avichai Adraei said people in the designated areas “must evacuate immediately” for their safety, including the Gaza European Hospital, forcing the evacuation of many patients and medical staff.
Doctors at a hospital near Khan Yunis said on Monday night that they too had received orders to evacuate. The Israeli army said in a statement on Tuesday morning that it had “no intention of evacuating the European Hospital.”
Source: Israeli military announcement
Leanne Abraham
A long offensive earlier this year destroyed large swaths of Khan Yunis before Israeli forces withdrew, claiming to have destroyed a Hamas battalion there, but Israeli commanders have repeatedly sent troops into areas they thought they had secured to crush resurgent Hamas militant strongholds.
The evacuation order was issued after the Israeli military reported that at least 20 rockets had been fired towards Israel from southern Gaza and said it had responded by firing artillery and striking the source.
Most of the Gaza Strip's population of approximately 2.2 million were displaced during the war, and many have had to flee multiple times to escape evacuation orders or fighting.
The United Nations condemned Monday's evacuation order. “It shows once again that there are no safe places in Gaza,” UN Secretary-General's spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York, adding that the announcement underscored the need for a ceasefire. “This is another halt to this deadly circular movement that Gaza's residents have to go through on a regular basis,” he added.
Dr. Mohamed Hallala, an emergency physician at the European Gaza Hospital, shared a video with The New York Times on Monday showing injured patients at the hospital being loaded onto stretchers and others being wheeled out in wheelchairs, and scenes of chaos in hospital rooms as a result of the frantic evacuation. Hallala estimated there were about 600 patients there, and said he was still helping evacuate the hospital.
In a message sent early Tuesday, Dr. Hallala said bombings were heard nearby and injured patients were being brought to the hospital despite orders to evacuate.
Doctors at Nasser Hospital, about six miles away, reported “panic chaos” and fist fights in the emergency room as ambulances arrived carrying patients from the Gaza European Hospital and had to compete for treatment with patients brought in from the area.
Hina Cheema, a Pakistani-American doctor working in Nasser as a humanitarian aid worker, said most roads in the area are destroyed and congested with people fleeing, making evacuation difficult and putting vulnerable patients at risk of dying during transport. She and Dr. Hallala said the drive from the European Gaza Hospital to Nasser takes about 30 minutes in current conditions.
Sheherazade Kawes, a spokeswoman for FAJR Scientific, a U.S.-based nonprofit that has organized humanitarian medical missions to Gaza, said the European Gaza Hospital had between 300 and 400 beds, but many more patients and displaced people had been taken there before the evacuation order was issued, she said.
Kawes said her organization had three foreign medical volunteers in the European side of Gaza, but all had been evacuated to safety.
A group of about 16 international medical workers was stranded at Europe Gaza Hospital for about two weeks after Israel seized the Rafah border crossing near Egypt in May. The hospital had not been ordered to evacuate at the time, said Adam Hamawi, an American doctor who worked there at the time. Hamawi wrote to President Biden about the crisis in Gaza, saying no one was safe, including civilians and humanitarian workers.
Dr. Mohammed Tahir, one of the medical workers stranded in Gaza Europe in May, said: a British-born orthopedic surgeon and peripheral nerve surgeon currently on his second medical mission at the European Gaza Hospital with Fazil Scientific, said on Monday that he had been evacuated to a safe house. “Disbelief, heartbreak and sadness. We have literally left our patients at EGH. We don't know who is going to look after them,” he said in a video message posted to social media and shared with The Times.
He said he had been treating patients with complicated injuries, including bone infections, before the evacuation and that their fate was uncertain. “These people will deteriorate quickly and may die within days,” he said.
Neil McFarquhar Contributed report.