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TEL AVIV — The standoff between Israeli troops and the Hamas militants who Israel maintains are taking cover in buildings designated for humanitarian purposes deepened Monday, as the death toll soared and the most vulnerable Gazans continued to get caught in the crossfire.
These kinds of buildings, including hospitals, schools, mosques and those belonging to aid groups or international organizations, have been increasingly in the crossfire during Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, focusing on Hamas infrastructure in the northern part of the Strip.
In the past three days, at least 32 people, including three children from the intensive care unit, have died in al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, which is surrounded by Israeli troops, Medhat Abbas, spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry, said Monday.
He said that at least 100 bodies were decomposing in the hospital complex — with some 50 inside the hospital and 60 more in the morgues that are without electricity — and that the ministry was unable to update its death toll because it lacked access and communications to the hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
Al-Quds Hospital, the second largest in the enclave, was surrounded Monday by Israeli forces and unable to evacuate its 300 remaining patients and medical workers because of Israeli bombardments and gunfire, Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which runs the hospital, said from Ramallah, in the West Bank.
The hospital has been almost entirely cut off from communications for six days, said Farsakh, whose team had communicated with al-Quds workers through a radio transmission connected to the hospital’s ambulance system but lost connection Monday morning, she said.
The IDF said in a statement that the situation was the result of a series of incidents in which a “terrorist squad embedded itself in the area of the ‘Al-Quds’ Hospital, fired from the hospital entrance at IDF soldiers, and was subsequently eliminated.”
On Sunday, a guesthouse from the U.N. refugee agency dealing with Palestinians, UNRWA, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, was hit by Israeli naval strikes, though the staff had cleared out 90 minutes before.
Israel’s hunt for Hamas puts Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital under siege
“The disregard for the protection of civilian infrastructure including U.N. facilities, hospitals, schools, shelters and places of worship is testament to the level of horror that civilians in Gaza are living every day,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said.
Abbas, of the Health Ministry, said “al-Shifa Hospital is under complete siege. There are more than 100 bodies lying on the ground and beginning to decompose, which turns the hospital into a dangerous place from an epidemiological standpoint. The smell of corpses has begun to spread everywhere.”
He said the hospital was still housing 8,000 displaced people and food supplies were dwindling. Though the Israeli army had told people they would be ensured safe passage on a certain road that was cleared of tanks, “the planes target anyone who tries to leave the hospital,” Abbas said.
Hamas has denied Israeli claims that it is holed up underneath the hospital. Medical personnel have said that the large complex is home only to the growing number of injured Gazans, for whom resource-strapped doctors have been struggling to provide lifesaving treatment.
Last month, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters that Hamas is using the hospital complex as a main command center to house its top leaders and arsenals and uses the center’s “4,000 staff members as a human shield.”
The hospital has “several underground complexes, used by the leaders of the terrorist organization Hamas to direct their activities, and a tunnel that reaches the hospital and allows entrance to the Hamas headquarters without going through the hospital,” said Hagari, who also shared audio recordings that he said attested to the Hamas-run subterranean complex.
The hospital is, according to the Israeli military, a strategic focal point of Israel’s war in Gaza. The Washington Post was not able to independently verify the materials shared.
Phone calls by Post reporters to doctors at al-Quds in recent days have gone straight to voice mail. Farsakh said the hospital’s evacuation plan included a convoy of six vehicles, two of which were ambulances as the fleet has been diminished by fuel shortages and strikes. The International Committee of the Red Cross was involved in the evacuation, she said. Alyona Synenko, an ICRC spokeswoman, declined to comment.
“The convoy is still waiting for the situation to settle down in the surrounding area of the hospital to be able to reach it to start the evacuation process,” the Palestine Red Crescent Society said on X, former Twitter.
Farsakh said thousands of displaced Gazans fled by foot from the hospital in recent days as the fighting nearby grew more intense and supplies diminished. As of last week, the hospital was housing at least 12,000 people.
Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Gaza Health Ministry, said that 200 families in the vicinity of al-Shifa Hospital cannot move from their homes and that 36 premature babies in the al-Shifa complex suffer from serious health complications.
On Sunday, three babies in the intensive care unit died following Israeli strikes that hit electrical generators, water wells and part of the ICU, he said.
The IDF, meanwhile, said Hamas had prevented the hospital from accepting 300 liters of fuel that Israeli soldiers hand-delivered for the medical emergency.
According to the Health Ministry’s Abbas, the hospital turned down the offer and “asked for fuel to be brought in through the Red Cross,” adding that the rate of diesel consumption in the hospital was 500 liters per hour.
Since the start of the IDF ground invasion of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 27, three weeks after a Hamas assault on Israel that killed 1,200 and led to the captivity of some 240 more, at least 11,180 people have been killed in Gaza — though that number has not been updated since Friday.
Hospitals have become the war’s symbol for the inhumanity of the enemy — with Israelis accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields and Palestinians accusing the Israeli army of using the deadly urban warfare to exact revenge on the civilian population.
But other civilian buildings, too, have become high profile as close combat rages onward. In a statement Saturday, the United Nations Development Program shared reports of the shelling of its compound in Gaza City. It said the facility was managed by its Program of Assistance to the Palestinian People until Oct. 13, when U.N. workers vacated the site. It said it had received reports on Nov. 6 that at least “several hundred people seeking refuge had entered the compound.” The statement read: “civilians, civilian infrastructure, and the inviolability of U.N. facilities, must be respected and protected at all times.”
In a message posted to X on the weekend, UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said there were reports of “deaths and injured among those who sought safety in our compound” after it was shelled.
When asked whether the Israeli military was responsible for the attack, an IDF spokesperson said Hamas bore sole responsibility for the loss of civilian life. He neither confirmed nor denied Israel’s responsibility for the strike against the UNDP office. The IDF said it had repeatedly warned civilians and third-party organizations to evacuate to southern Gaza.
Overnight Monday, the IDF continued to carry out raids on the outskirts of the nearby Shati refugee camp, where they said Hamas had hidden large reserves of weapons and explosive devices inside the Abu Bakr Mosque and inside a children’s room in a home belonging to a senior Islamic Jihad militant, among other locations.
Dadouch reported from Beirut, Berger from Jerusalem and Balousha from Amman, Jordan. Hajar Harb in London contributed to this report.
Israel-Gaza war
Israeli tanks, amid explosions and falling shells, surrounded overcrowded hospitals in Gaza City on Friday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel does not “seek to occupy Gaza,” marking a shift in tone after his previous comments that raised red flags in the Biden administration. Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war.
Hostages: Officials say Hamas militants abducted about 239 hostages in a highly organized attack. Four hostages have been released — two Americans and two Israelis — as families hold on to hope. One released Israeli hostage recounted the “spiderweb” of Gaza tunnels she was held in.
Humanitarian aid: The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it has received over 370 trucks with food, medicine and water in the Gaza Strip through Egypt’s Rafah crossing. However, the PRCS said, there hasn’t been permission yet to bring in fuel to power the enclave’s hospitals, water pumps, taxis and more.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has a complicated history, and its rulers have long been at odds with the Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed government in the West Bank. Here is a timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.