The humanitarian crisis in the northern Gaza Strip deepened Saturday as an Israeli bombardment killed at least 20 people, trapped thousands more and prompted one of the area’s last functioning hospitals to issue desperate pleas for assistance.
Israeli air strikes overnight and into Saturday hit the Jabalia area of northern Gaza, even as the Israeli military presses ahead with its campaign in Lebanon, where it warned residents of 23 more towns to evacuate Saturday.
Roughly 400,000 people remain in northern Gaza, according to the United Nations, and many have been trapped in their ruined neighbourhoods by Israeli air strikes, which the military says are targeting Hamas and other allied groups.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said five of its staff members were trapped in Jabalia and one of them had reported that “about 20 people” were killed in an air strike on Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital. The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least 49 people had been killed across Gaza since Friday and 219 wounded people had arrived at hospitals in the enclave.
Israel’s military has issued evacuation warnings for the area in recent days, but aid workers said the fighting made it difficult to follow those instructions.
“Nobody is allowed to get in or out,” Sarah Vuylsteke, a project co-ordinator for MSF, said in the group’s statement. “Anyone who tries is getting shot.”
Jabalia was once a large town with an adjoining refugee camp, composed of dense urban dwellings, that shared its name. But it has largely been destroyed by ground combat and repeated Israeli bombardments of the area since the war began last year after the Hamas-led October 7th attack on Israel.
This past week, the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area, and a new one was issued Saturday morning. Avichay Adraee, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on the social platform X that the military was “operating with great force” against Hamas and other allied groups “and will continue to do so for a long period of time”.
“The designated area, including the shelters located there, is considered a dangerous combat zone,” he added.
Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for Unicef in the Palestinian territories, described Israel’s evacuation order in northern Gaza as “extremely concerning” because it explicitly warned that shelters would not be safe and included sites like Kamal Adwan Hospital.
On Saturday, Gaza’s government media office said the hospital’s intensive care unit was facing a “catastrophic situation”.
“The coming hours will be decisive for the lives of many children in the intensive care unit, because fuel is running out and the occupation is preventing it from reaching hospitals in the north, and because of overcrowding,” the media office said.
Mr Crickx said in an interview that he had visited that hospital three weeks ago, including its paediatric intensive care unit, one of the few left in the Gaza Strip.
“I remember seeing a baby, around eight or nine months old, whose body had been hit by shrapnel,” he said. “I’m wondering what’s happening to that child now. These evacuation orders put already vulnerable children, struggling for their lives, at even greater risk.”
Israel has routinely struck areas of Gaza that it has described as safe humanitarian zones, and buildings that house displaced civilians, including schools being used as shelters. The Israeli military has said that such strikes are targeting Hamas and other militants who operated from those areas, using the civilians as human shields, which Hamas has denied doing.
On Saturday, Mr Adraee, the Israeli military spokesman, also posted evacuation warnings for almost two dozen towns in southern Lebanon, saying that Israel would strike them as part of its war against Hizbullah, the Shiite militant group.
He accused Hizbullah of using ambulances to transport weapons and fighters and said Israel would strike ambulances if it believed them to be used for that purpose.
In its statements, MSF called on Israel to protect civilians and hospitals in the Gaza Strip and to “allow desperately needed humanitarian supplies to enter the north as a matter of extreme urgency”.
“Forced evacuations of homes and bombing of neighbourhoods by the Israeli forces is turning north Gaza into uninhabitable ruins,” it added.
Wafa, the official news media of the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas, said in a report on Saturday that Israeli air strikes had also caused deaths and injuries in the areas of Al-Safatay and Al-Tawam, close to Jabalia.
The news agency said the humanitarian situation there was “deteriorating rapidly” with the military operations blocking the entry of food, medical supplies and potable water into the area. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.