Israel Strikes Hospital in the north of Gaza and captures the fundamental part of the South
The Israeli army hit and destroyed part of a hospital in the north of Gaza on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops that fought elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the Southern Gaza Strip, interrupting the links between two Palestinian cities positioned strategically.
Nobody was killed in the attack on the Arabic hospital Ahli, but a child who is treated for a head injury died due to the hasty evacuation, according to a declaration issued by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, who supervises the medical center. The strike destroyed a laboratory and damaged a pharmacy, the emergency department and a church in the complex of the hospital in Zeitoun, added the declaration.
The hospital had become one of the last pillars of the Gaza health system, where the medical centers were often damaged and besieged During the war started with the attack led by Hamas to Israel. World Health Organization shown Last month that 33 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza had been damaged during the war and only 21 remained partially functional. Even who warned Saturday that the hospitals of Gaza face a lack of looming medicine because Israel has blocked the help of help for six weeks.
The Ahli Arab hospital complex was hit for the first time less than two weeks in the war when a missile hit A parking lot on the site where dozens of displaced families were repairing. Hamas blameless The strike on Israel, before Israel said that it was caused by an incorrect rocket shot by the Palestinian Islamic jihad, an allied group with Hamas. US intelligence officials later he said They had “high confidence” in the Israeli account.
The Israeli army recognized responsibility for the last strike of the hospital on Sunday, saying without offering evidence that the site had hosted a Hamas command center. Both the military and the Anglican Church said that Israeli soldiers had called the hospital to order its evacuation before the strike. Neither the hospital authorities nor Hamas answered questions that the hospital had been used by Hamas fighters.
In a separate development, the Israeli defense minister announced on Saturday the capture of an east-west strategic road in the south of Gaza. This separates the links between Rafah and Khan Youunis, the two main cities of the south of Gaza – and expands the occupation of Israel in that part of the enclave.
Israel defines the “Morag corridor”, after a Jewish settlement in the area that was dissolved when Israeli troops evacuated Gaza in 2005.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Israel had placed the entire region between the corridor and the Gaza-Egypt-a area of about 25 square miles-attends of “Israel’s Security Zone”. The military claimed to have surrounded the city of Rafah but has not yet established the operational control of each neighborhood.
Before breaking the ceasefire with Hamas in March, the Israeli troops controlled only a fragment of land in the south of Gaza along the borders of the territory with Egypt and Israel. But they started to expand their control At the beginning of April In what the Israeli leaders said that it was an offer of pressing on Hamas in release about 60 hostages – some deemed dead – still held in the enclave.
Amera Harouda Reports contributed by Doha, Qatar.
