Palestinians check the site of a deadly explosion in al-Ahli hospital, in Gaza City. Photo / AP
“We’ve never lived through a war this intense,” said a Palestinian journalist who captured the aftermath of the blast in Gaza that killed hundreds.
Sameh al-Jaroosha was sitting on the edge of the grassy courtyard of the Ahli hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday night, talking to a new acquaintance who was among the thousands of Palestinian residents of the city seeking refuge there in hopes that it would be safer than staying at home.
Then something struck nearby, he recounted Wednesday, sending an explosion throughout the area that killed hundreds of people. Sameh, 17, escaped with burns and shrapnel wounds.
“It struck suddenly,” he said at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where he was being treated. “Directly on the people.”
On Wednesday, the devastating impact of the explosion at the hospital was becoming clearer. Charred cars lining a parking lot. The courtyard littered with bloody blankets and backpacks. Tattered clothing where dozens of bodies had lain. The smell of blood and burned metal hanging in the air.
Emergency workers were collecting bodies and remains in an effort to identify the dead.
Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli airstrike, an assertion that was disputed by the Israel Defence Forces, which said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by the armed Palestinian faction Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. US officials say they have multiple strands of intelligence — including infrared satellite data — indicating that the blast was caused by a launch of a rocket or missile from Palestinian fighter positions within Gaza.
Neither side’s account could be independently verified, and the precise death toll remained unclear. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that at least 471 people were killed.
The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, which runs the Ahli hospital, said the hospital administration had received at least three warnings from the Israeli military to evacuate its wards Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The archbishop of the diocese, the Reverend Hosam Naoum, said the warnings were issued by phone call and text message directly to their administration and were separate from the general warnings given to the more than 1 million residents of the northern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military acknowledged that it did call the hospital in recent days, but it said it was part of a wider effort to encourage residents and community leaders in northern Gaza to flee southward — signalling that a ground invasion was coming. The call was not to warn of a specific strike on the hospital, said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, a military spokesperson. The hospital “was not in any way a target,” he added.
After the first warning, the hospital staff notified the 5,000 or so people sheltering there. Most left and only about 200 remained, Naoum said. But the next day, many returned, having found no safer place as airstrikes pounded the city.
“Every time there’s bombing, every time there’s an airstrike, people flee to the hospital,” Naoum said. “This is a sanctuary for them.”
The warnings didn’t dissuade Sameh and his family from seeking refuge there. They had joined the thousands of people who fled their homes elsewhere in Gaza City to take shelter amid 11 days of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s intense bombardment of Gaza began on October 7 in response to a surprise attack by Hamas that killed roughly 1,400 people in Israel. Since then, Palestinians in Gaza have found that nowhere is safe, as homes, mosques, schools and hospitals have been struck. More than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed since the strikes began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
On Saturday, two Israeli projectiles hit the same hospital that was struck Tuesday night, damaging the fourth floor, which housed a diagnostic centre and the ultrasound and mammography units, the hospital administration said. However, the Israeli military denied that it had struck that area Saturday.
Sameh said he and his family fled their home in Gaza City fearing that it could be in danger from Israeli rockets, and went to stay with an aunt. But then they grew concerned that her home was under threat as well, so they came to the hospital.
There, he found many other displaced Palestinians in Gaza staying in the courtyard, library and church.
“We felt it was safe, and we said it would be safe for the little kids,” he said from his hospital bed.
But Tuesday night, the courtyard where just hours earlier children were enjoying the hospital playground along with hospital staff became a scene of carnage.
“There are still lots of bodies they haven’t yet collected,” said Amir Ahmed, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza City. “There are too many bodies.” He said all the victims would be buried in a mass grave at a funeral Wednesday.
“There is a big possibility that they will just put a number” on the body bags without any names, Ahmed added, “because many are in pieces.”
About half of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million Palestinians have fled their homes since the Israeli bombardment began, according to the United Nations. Many have sought shelter in the corridors and courtyards of hospitals, believing that they would be less vulnerable there.
But those, too, are in danger of getting caught up in the violence. In addition to the Ahli hospital, the Israeli military warned a number of other hospitals in Gaza City in the north and others in southern Gaza to evacuate before an anticipated ground invasion.
The Ahli hospital resumed operations as the interiors of its buildings suffered minimal impact from the blast.
Many of those killed at the hospital were women and children, said Dr Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Gaza. He said doctors in another hospital in Gaza City were now performing surgery on patients on the floor or in corridors, often without anaesthetic.
“The sudden increase of hundreds of victims with complex injuries far exceeded the capabilities of medical crews and ambulances,” he said in a statement.
Many of the wounded could die because of a severe shortage of medical supplies, water and electricity. Israel has imposed a complete siege of Gaza since last week, cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel.
The evacuation orders given to hospitals like Ahli were “impossible to carry out,” said Dr Ahmed al-Mandhari, the World Health Organisation regional director for the eastern Mediterranean, given the security situation, the critical condition of many patients and a lack of ambulances, staff and hospital beds.
Palestinian journalist Motasem Mortaja captured a chaotic scene Tuesday night at one of those sites, Shifa Hospital, posting videos to social media of screaming children in bloody clothing, women wailing in pain and men kneeling in prayer.
Hospital staff members were treating the wounded wherever they could, rushing to bandage men lying on a floor red with blood.
In one video, a young child lifts his shirt to reveal a wound to his chest. His hands, hair and clothes are dusty from the blast.
“I hope that this war ends soon,” Mortaja said in a voice memo sent Tuesday night to The New York Times. “We’ve never lived through a war this intense.”
Under a tent outside Shifa Hospital, where many of the dead and wounded were taken, workers lifted the dead from the blankets they were wrapped in and placed them in white body bags. In videos posted to Instagram and verified by the Times, other bodies lay exposed, and people walked past them in search of loved ones.
In one of the videos, a man standing over the bodies of two young boys wailed in grief.
”I don’t have any more children. These were my only children,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Raja Abdulrahim, Hiba Yazbek and Yousur Al-Hlou
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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