Gaza hospital damaged in Israeli strike: civil defence

Gaza’s civil defence agency said an Israeli airstrike destroyed parts of a hospital early Sunday after Israel seized a corridor in the war-battered Palestinian territory and said it planned to expand its military offensive.

There were no reports of casualties in the strike and the Israeli military told AFP they were looking into the incident.

The civil defence agency in the Hamas-run territory said Israel’s air force targeted a building of the Al-Ahli hospital, also known as the Baptist or Ahli Arab hospital, in Gaza City after midnight.

The airstrike came “minutes after the (Israeli) army’s warning to evacuate this building of patients, the injured and their companions”, the agency said in a statement.

“The bombing led to the destruction of the surgery building and the oxygen generation station for the intensive care units,” it added.

Hospitals, protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023.

The Israeli military accuses Hamas of having tunnels under hospitals and using the medical facilities as command centres to plan and carry out attacks against the army and Israel, a charge denied by the Palestinian group.

Al-Ahli hospital was heavily damaged by an explosion in its car park on October 17, 2023, leaving scores of people dead.

Militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad accused Israel, which denied responsibility and blamed a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad for that blast — a claim backed by the United States.

Hamas’s press office said Sunday that Israeli forces had targeted Gaza’s hospitals, including Al-Ahli, with “bombing, arson (and) destruction”, or otherwise rendered them “non-operational”, since the start of the war.

On March 28, the World Health Organization said 22 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were partially functional.

The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday at least 1,563 Palestinians had been killed since March 18 when a ceasefire collapsed, taking the overall death toll since the war began to 50,933.