WHO condemns Israeli massacre in Gaza hospital

“There was no official warning or evacuation order before the bombing of … the hospital, only rumors that spread panic,” Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, said on Friday.

The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital earlier stated Israel conducted several attacks on Friday that hit the facility, one of the last functioning health centers in the northern area.

Four hospital staff were among “a large number of” wounded and dead, according to the statement.

The hospital was surrounded and stormed by Israeli military forces under heavy fire, forcing patients and the wounded to evacuate.

The Israeli forces stormed the medical facility and conducted a widespread arrest campaign among civilians and even wounded people alongside caregivers.

The director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital has reiterated that the situation in the hospital is absolutely catastrophic and has reach a critical inflection point.

The hospital is now working under the pressure of relentless Israeli bombardment and dwindling supplies.

It has been overwhelmed by bodies, which have been lined up on the ground, and they are unable to even provide those bodies with a proper burial due to the security conditions.

The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli forces blew up a residential block near the Kamal Adwan Hospital, resulting in the killing of several civilians and the injury of others.

The WHO has also warned that the pace of medical evacuations of sick and wounded Palestinians out of Gaza, including several thousand children, is so slow that it will take five to 10 years to clear the backlog at the current rate.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the WHO official also noted only 78 out of 12,000 patients requiring evacuation had managed to leave recently.

“Some 12,000 patients across Gaza still need medical evacuation, only 78 have been evacuated,” Peeperkorn added.

The Israeli military often takes months to respond to medical evacuation requests, and the number of evacuations has plunged in recent months.

Among the 12,000, according to UNICEF, are 2,500 children some of whom have died during an often months long wait to leave for hospitals outside.