Israeli troops surrounded two more Gaza hospitals on Sunday, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, while Israel said it captured 480 fighters in ongoing clashes at Gaza’s main Al-Shifa hospital.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said a member of its staff was killed when Israeli tanks suddenly retreated to areas around Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in the southern town of Khan Younis amid heavy bombardment and gunfire.
Israeli armoured troops cordoned off Al-Amal hospital and carried out extensive bulldozing in its vicinity, the Red Crescent said in a statement:
All of our teams are in extreme danger at the moment and are completely immobilised.
The statement said Israeli troops demanded the complete evacuation of staff, patients and displaced persons from Al-Amal premises and fired smoke bombs at the area to displace its occupants.
Dozens of patients and health workers were detained by Israeli troops in Al-Shifa in the city, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said.
In Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city on the border with Egypt, which was the last refuge for half of Gaza’s evicted population, an Israeli airstrike on a house killed seven people, health officials said.
At least 32,226 Palestinians have been killed, including 84 in the past 24 hours, and 74,518 injured in Israel’s air and ground offensive since 7 October, the health ministry said in a Sunday update.
Meanwhile, UN chief António Guterres said in Cairo on Sunday that delivering needed aid to famine-threatened Gaza “requires Israel to remove the remaining obstacles and barriers to aid.”
On Saturday, he visited the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip, where nearly six months of war and blockade have displaced the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people and destroyed civilian infrastructure. Guterres called the Rafah border crossing and Egypt’s El Arish airport, through which aid flows, “the most important arteries that bring life-saving aid to Gaza.”
