The Ministry of Health in the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip announced Friday (February 16) that four patients had died following power outages that caused oxygen distribution to stop at a Gaza hospital, which Israeli forces took control of.
“The generators of the hospital complex stopped and the electricity was cut” in the Nasser hospital in Khan Younes, the ministry said in a press release. He added that he feared for the lives of nine other patients in the hospital’s intensive care unit and nursery, and held “Israeli forces responsible for the lives of patients and teams” there.
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed on Friday to have arrested “more than twenty terrorists who participated” in the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, among “dozens of suspects” arrested at the hospital. She adds that she found in the vicinity of the hospital complex “remains of mortar shells, grenades and other weapons belonging” to Hamas, which according to her has used the hospital to fire on Israeli forces in recent weeks.
Targeted operation
The Hamas health ministry said Thursday that several hundred people – patients, medical staff and other civilians – were still inside the hospital complex.
The Israeli army explained the same day that it had launched a “targeted operation” on the Nasser hospital based on “credible information” saying that Hamas had held hostages there “and that there might be bodies hostages” on site. She then clarified in the evening that she had “not yet found evidence” of this in the complex.
Thousands of civilian refugees
After more than four months of war between Israel and Hamas, the violence is concentrated in the south of the besieged and devastated Gaza Strip, between the towns of Khan Younes and Rafah, the last town in the south of the Gaza Strip, backed on the closed border with Egypt.
The Nasser hospital has in recent weeks welcomed thousands of civilians fleeing the war, some of them in recent days in chaotic conditions as the heat of the fighting between the army and the Palestinian Islamist movement grew closer.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally (AFP) based on official Israeli data. Israel launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip in retaliation which left 28,775 dead, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the latest report on Friday from the Ministry of Health of the Gaza Strip administered by Hamas.
