Pic from social media
Doha, Qatar: The health ministry in the Gaza Strip says at least 500 people have been killed in an Israeli attack on al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
Gaza’s Hamas government described the attack as a “war crime”.
Video shows the moment an Israeli projectile hit the Al AhlI Baptist Hospital in besieged Gaza. The Gaza Ministry of Health revealed to Al Jazeera that the hospital bombing has left over 500 victims in its wake.
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“The hospital was housing hundreds of sick and wounded, and people forcibly displaced from their homes” because of other Israeli attacks, a statement said.
Large numbers of injured people are being brought into al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after an Israeli attack on the courtyard of al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
Many of the wounded appeared to be women and children. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was sheltering families amid Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza.
About 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip since the war erupted on October 7. More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed.
Hassan Khalaf, the medical director of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City, about one kilometer (less than a mile) from al-Ahli Arab, says the hospital “is still burning” after Israel’s attack.
Khalaf told Al Jazeera that thousands of Palestinians have been injured in the continuing Israeli bombardment and there is no safe place left.
“Where [is there] to go?” he asked.
“They want to do massacres and massacres and massacres in Gaza.”
Zaher Sahloul, president of the US-based MedGlobal humanitarian organisation, has called the mass-casualty Israeli strike on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital “the worst attack on a medical facility in the 21st century”.
“Bombing hospitals is against international law. It is a war crime. It undermines medical neutrality and the 150-year-old Geneva Conventions, and deprives a distressed local Palestinian community from access to healthcare,” Sahloul said.
The WHO has demanded the immediate protection of civilians and healthcare workers in the Gaza Strip after the attack on al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
“The hospital was operational, with patients, health- and care-givers, and internally-displaced people sheltering there. Early reports indicate hundreds of fatalities and injuries,” the UN health agency said in a statement.
The hospital was one of 20 in the north of the Gaza Strip facing evacuation orders from the Israeli military, the WHO added.
