Health Ministry reports ‘large numbers’ of killed and wounded rushed to hospital as a result of nonstop Israeli bombardment.
The Israeli military is conducting intense assaults across the Gaza Strip by air, land and sea, killing more than 200 people and spreading fear among its war-weary displaced population.
Dozens of air raids hit the besieged territory on Saturday, particularly in Deir el-Balah and Nuseirat in central Gaza, homes west of the city of Rafah in the south and multiple areas in Gaza City to the north.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said “large numbers” of killed and wounded were arriving at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the majority of whom are children and women.
“Dozens of injured people are lying on the ground, and medical teams are trying to save them with the basic medical capabilities they have available,” it said, adding that it is short on medicine and food, and that its main generator has stopped functioning due to a lack of fuel.
A statement released by the Gaza Government Media Office said that 210 people had been killed in the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat and other parts of central Gaza.
A health ministry spokesman earlier said that there were still “a lot of” bodies and wounded people that remained on the streets.
Communications were affected amid the intense bombardment, but reporting from inside the “overwhelmed” hospital via a telephone call, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the situation is tense, with terrified people on the street not knowing where to turn.
“There are explosions happening every minute. Ambulances are transferring the wounded to the hospital where we are trapped. It’s chaos inside the hospital. There are children among the wounded,” she said.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), described Al-Aqsa Hospital as a “complete bloodbath”, adding that it looked “like a slaughterhouse”.
“The images and videos that I’ve received show patients lying everywhere in pools of blood … their limbs have been blown off,” she told Al Jazeera.
“That is what a massacre looks like,” she added. “It means parents running around caring for their children who have blood running from their head trying to find a medic to treat them. But it’s so chaotic and there’s so many patients that is vastly outnumbering the healthcare ability to care for them.”
In a short statement, the Israeli military said its forces were “targeting terrorist infrastructure in the area of Nuseirat”. It later announced its forces rescued four captives during the operation in Nuseirat. The four, who were taken into Gaza after the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7, were in “good medical condition”, the military said.
Also in central Gaza, at least six Palestinians from one family were killed by Israeli forces after they shelled their home in the Bureij refugee camp in the morning.
Dozens of air raids targeted the southern areas of Gaza City, with witnesses reporting that entire residential blocks were wiped out, while gunships bombarded the area near its fishing port.
The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reacted to Saturday’s attacks by calling for an emergency UN Security Council session on what he denounced as a “bloody massacre that was carried out by the Israeli forces”.
The Israeli military is only intensifying its deadly campaign in Gaza after an attack on Thursday killed about 40 people sheltering at a United Nations-run school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where some 6,000 displaced Palestinians were sheltering.
It claimed it killed 17 “terrorists” in that attack, but the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said in a condemning statement that the “school turned shelter” was targeted without any warning and those responsible must be held to account.
Hamas accused the Israeli military of providing “false information” about the 17, saying at least several of those announced killed are still alive.
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