Smoke rises from buildings hit in Israeli airstrikes in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 28, 2024
THE Israeli military was accused of targeting civilians after it detained dozens of Palestinians in a raid on a hospital in northern Gaza over the weekend.
Today Israeli war planes continued their attack on the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre while Egypt led moves towards a temporary ceasefire in the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon.
Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya on Friday, detaining 44 male staff, according to the World Health Organisation. Palestinian medical officials said the hospital, which was treating some 200 patients, was heavily damaged in the raid.
Israel has raided several hospitals in Gaza over the course of the war, accusing Hamas and other resistance fighters of using them for military purposes.
Palestinian medical officials deny those allegations and accuse the military of deliberately targeting civilians.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been fundamentally dishonest in obscuring the extent of his and the UK military’s active support for Israel’s genocide. Starmer has been urging Israel to be restrained while secretly Israel would not have been able to conduct it’s genocidal campaign without UK support. The UK air force has conducted 49% of spy flights over Gaza identifying targets, UK’s 77 Brigade specialising in psychological warfare has been advising Israel – no doubt about all the lies that have enabled hospitals to be destroyed – and weapons have been supplied to Israel through UK bases in Cyprus. It is now revealed that Starmer & Co are intimately involved in the slaughter of non-combatants, aid workers, journalists and health workers and in the deliberate starvation inflicted on Gaza.
Starmer has proved himself to be totally unfit to be UK’s Prime Minister. We need him and his fellow Zionist conspirators to be tried and convicted of genocide and war crimes.
10.15p.m. Israel’s Gaza genocide and wider militarism should be regarded as mostly a joint venture between United States, United Kingdom and Israel. The parties cannot be distinguished. In UK current Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy – who very recently claimed that it was not a genocide – are every bit as guilty of war crimes as the Israelis.
A picture shows the damage to an ambulance at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on October 26, 2024. (Photo: /AFP via Getty Images)
“Such blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop,” the official said.
Israel could kill everyone left in Northern Gaza if its assault on the enclave continues, a United Nations relief official warned on Saturday.
U.N. Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya also called for an end to the Israeli attack.
“What Israeli forces are doing in besieged North Gaza cannot be allowed to continue,” Msuya said.
“Instead of receiving aid, we are receiving tanks.”
In particular, Msuya emphasized Israel’s targeting of hospitals and shelters and interference with relief work.
“Hospitals have been hit, and health workers have been detained. Shelters have been emptied and burned down. First responders have been prevented from saving people from under the rubble. Families have been separated, and men and boys are being taken away by the truckload,” she said.
Msuya estimated that Israel’s actions in the north had killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands. According to Al Jazeera, an Israeli siege on the north that began earlier in October has killed around 640.
“The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” Msuya said. “Such blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop.”
The U.N. official’s remarks came as Israeli troops withdrew from a deadly attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, which Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum said “is considered a medical lifeline for the two-thirds of Palestinians in northern Gaza.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had surrounded the hospital for days before entering and opening fire on Thursday and Friday, the Gaza Health Ministry and the hospital’s director told CNN.
“Instead of receiving aid, we are receiving tanks,” hospital director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya said in a video.
Medics told Al Jazeera that the IDF had detained 44 members of the hospital team, later releasing 14 of them. The director of field hospitals in Gaza, Marwan Al-Hams, said that soldiers had also destroyed medications as they left, “preventing us from saving the wounded.”
“It is a catastrophic situation as patients and the wounded are left on the floor without any medical attention,” hospital spokesperson Hisham Sakani told Al Jazeera. “We are facing grave dangers, and here I am once again sending an SOS to the whole world. We pray to God almighty our plight comes to an end and Israeli massacres [are] ceased.”
“The entire population north of Gaza Strip are now without any medical service after all the hospitals have been destroyed and forced out of operation,” Sahani continued.
Msuya’s statement also came a day after U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called Friday’s attacks on northern Gaza the “darkest moment” of the war.
“The Israeli Government’s policies and practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians,” Türk said. “We are facing what could amount to atrocity crimes, including potentially extending to crimes against humanity.”
Msuya and Türk’s statements reflect the opinion of human rights experts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice is still considering the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel. To date, the Israeli assault has killed at least 42,924 people and wounded 100,833, but the true numbers could be much higher.
Emergency medical doctor Mads Gilbert, who has volunteered in both Gaza and Lebanon, criticized Western governments for allowing the raid on Kamal Adwan, as well as Israel’s systematic attacks on healthcare workers and facilities in Gaza.
“We need an additional factor to understand why this has been allowed to go on, and that is actually that the Palestinian people are defined as under-humans,” Gilbert told Al Jazeera. “We would never have allowed this to happen, for example, in Ukraine. Almost 250,000 people in the northern part of Gaza have now no healthcare, and that in itself is part of the genocide.”
The Institute for Middle East Understanding called on both the international community and the U.S. government to respond to Israel’s violations of international law.
“The Biden-Harris administration must stop the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel which constitutes a necessary step to halting Israel’s ongoing war crimes,” IMEU wrote on social media Saturday. “It’s time for an arms embargo now.”
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
A man carries a child wounded in an Israeli strike on a school housing forcibly displaced Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp, on October 24, 2024 in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Palestine. (Photo: Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Our ambulances can’t transfer wounded people,” said one overwhelmed hospital director. “Those who can arrive by themselves to the hospital receive care, but those who don’t just die in the streets.”
A devastating wave of Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and Thursday have killed or wounded hundreds of Palestinians, including many children, according to local and international media reports.
Citing Gaza Civil Defense officials, Palestine’s Quds News Network reported Thursday that at least 150 Palestinian civilians were killed or wounded by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombardment of around a dozen apartment towers on Al-Houja Street in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Local and international media outlets earlier reported at least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens more wounded by an IDF strike on the al-Shuhada school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
At least 17 Palestinians, including children, were killed and a number of others were injured in an Israeli bombardment that targeted a school housing displaced people in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/GY1cGLd45I
Medical staff at the al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat—where many people killed and wounded in the strike were taken—told Al Jazeera that 13 children under age 18 and three women were among the dead.
The IDF said the strike targeted a Hamas command-and-control center. However, survivors and eyewitnesses said that all of the dead were women and children.
Gaza Notifications published the names of 16 people killed in the attack, including at least five children—the youngest of whom was a baby, just 11 months old.
The outlet said a total of 203 Palestinian civilians have been killed so far on Thursday, and that “all medical and rescue operations have been completely halted by the military administration.”
“The Israeli army has warned that ambulances and rescue teams will be directly targeted if they attempt to continue their operations, effectively blocking any humanitarian efforts,” the site added.
Gaza’s Government Media Office reported 34 Palestinians including 11 children were burned alive in an IDF strike on a youth club-turned shelter in the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.
Israeli forces have also reportedly attacked hospitals and healthcare workers throughout Gaza. The Palestine Chronicle reported that IDF troops opened fire on Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, “with sick children inside.”
Hussam Abu Safia, the hospital’s director, told Al Jazeera that IDF tanks surrounded the facility and “directly targeted” it, severely damaging the intensive care unit. On Wednesday, Abu Safia said there were more than 150 wounded people in the hospital, including 14 children in the ICU or neonatal ward.
“There is a very large number of wounded people, and we lose at least one person every hour because of the lack of medical supplies and medical staff,” he said. “Our ambulances can’t transfer wounded people. Those who can arrive by themselves to the hospital receive care, but those who don’t just die in the streets.”
The Palestinian Ministry of Health also said several of its employees were wounded by Israeli artillery strikes on Thursday.
Earlier this month, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report detailing how “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”
Israel’s ongoing offensive in northern and central Gaza has killed or wounded more than 2,000 Palestinians this month alone, according to Gaza officials. Since last October, Israel’s war on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the International Court of Justice—has left more than 153,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened; and most of the coastal enclave in ruins.
GAZA HEALTH MINISTRY: 42,847 Palestinians have been killed, and 100,544 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7, 2023. pic.twitter.com/IUGklWnyYT
Thursday’s strikes came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to the Middle East, where he is set to take part in cease-fire negotiations with officials from Israel, Egypt, and Qatar in the Qatari capital Doha.
“Going back to the negotiations on ceasefire and the hostages, one of the things we’re doing is looking at whether there are different options that we can pursue to get us to a conclusion, to get us to a result,” Blinken said Thursday.
The United States is Israel’s primary international backer, providing billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover including multiple vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions.
