A woman reacts while people bury bodies of Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike, at the Nasser hospital premises as Palestinians cannot reach the cemetery due to the Israeli ground offensive, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22. (Reuters photo)
Gaza City, January 24 (RHC)-- The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has condemned the deliberate targeting of Gaza’s hospitals by Israel as a "war crime," urging the international community to take immediate action to stop it.
Hamas, in a statement on Tuesday, called on the United Nations, and other international bodies to take immediate action against the Israeli aggression against medical centers in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis. The Palestinian resistance also warned that the Israeli attacks put the lives of patients, medical staff and the refugees at hospitals, at risk.
Earlier in the day, Gaz Numeracióna’s health ministry said the Israeli tanks fired directly at the upper floors of the specialized surgery building at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The regime has also blockaded and targeted other hospitals in southern Gaza, claiming that Hamas fighters operate in and around these places. Hamas has denied the allegations.
Khan Younis, the largest city in the south of the Strip, has been the focus of the regime’s latest strikes. Some 190 people have been killed over the past 24 hours, almost a third of them in Khan Yunis.
At Khan Younis's main hospital, the biggest still functioning in the Gaza Strip, bodies were being buried on the grounds because it was unsafe to go out to the cemetery.
At the European Hospital, reached by media outlets in southern Khan Younis, Ahed Masmah brought in five corpses, piled on a mattress on his donkey cart. "I found them face-down in the street," he said. "I did a good thing and brought them in.”
Footage filmed by Palestinian journalist Hamdan El-Dahdouh showed persistent gunfire hitting the top of the main building. "I am besieged at Nasser Hospital now and my life is in great danger. The smell of death, the only smell I know, is filling the place," Dr Mahmoud Abu Shammala posted on Facebook.
On the 109th day of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza, the death toll has risen to more than 25,500, predominantly comprising women and children. Despite its deadly and destructive campaign in Gaza, Israel has so far failed to achieve its main goals in the onslaught, namely destroying Hamas and securing the release of its captives through military means.
The World Health Organization said most of the enclave's 36 hospitals have been damaged by Israeli bombing. Only 15 are partially functioning and those are operating at up to three times their capacity, without adequate fuel or medical supplies, it says.
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has announced the destruction of more than 390 schools, universities, and educational institutions in over 100 days of brutal bombardment of the besieged strip by the Israeli regime.
the city reportedly threatened the few healthcare facilities still open in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Hamas said that the destruction of school and university buildings in the Gaza Strip “is a war crime and criminal behavior aimed at destroying all components of human life.”
The resistance group stated that Israel is deliberately targeting the education system to erode the national identity of Palestinians.
