In a shocking development amidst the ongoing Gaza conflict, Israeli forces conducted a raid on the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza on Friday morning. The assault came just a day after hospital staff reported that five of their colleagues, including a pediatrician and paramedics, were killed in an Israeli strike near the medical facility.
According to the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Israeli troops entered the hospital grounds with tanks and bulldozers, giving staff only 15 minutes to evacuate themselves and their patients. Medics were forced to disconnect critical patients from life-sustaining oxygen support in order to comply with the abrupt orders.
The occupation army is burning all the operating departments in the hospital while we are still there. The army evacuated the entire medical staff and the displaced people and arrested a number of the medical staff. There are a large number of injuries among the medical staff.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Kamal Adwan Hospital Director
Abu Safiya reported that Israeli soldiers threatened him with arrest and caused significant damage to the hospital buildings and medical equipment during the incursion. Video footage showed some of the hospital occupants being marched past Israeli forces clad only in their underwear, though the destination of the detained individuals remains unknown.
Hospitals Under Siege
The unfolding scene at Kamal Adwan hospital is emblematic of the dire situation facing medical facilities across the Gaza Strip. Located in the heavily bombarded Jabaliya refugee camp, the hospital has been operating under siege conditions since October 2023 when Israel launched a third military operation in the area, systematically razing homes and infrastructure.
In recent days, Abu Safiya and his staff documented an intensifying barrage of drone strikes around the hospital complex. On Thursday alone, an estimated 50 people, including the five medical workers, lost their lives in the vicinity of the facility, which remains one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza.
We currently don’t know what will happen to us, the patients are being forcibly evacuated to the Indonesian hospital. They cut the oxygen from them, there are patients who [could] die at any moment.
Kamal Adwan Hospital Medical Staff Member
Mounting Casualties and Displacement
The assault on Kamal Adwan hospital is but one incident in an unrelenting campaign that has claimed the lives of over 45,300 Palestinians since the war began, according to Gaza health officials. Israeli airstrikes on Friday took an additional 25 lives, including 15 members of a single family in Gaza City.
Vast swaths of Gaza now lie in ruins, with entire neighborhoods in the north systematically leveled in what some speculate is an Israeli effort to create a depopulated buffer zone along the border. Of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents, nearly all have been displaced by the fighting.
Hostage Crisis Ignites Conflict
The current war erupted on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked targets in southern Israel, killing over 1,200 people and capturing 251 Israelis, who were then transported to Gaza as hostages. In the 441 days since, Israeli forces have waged an unrelenting campaign to crush Hamas and secure the release of the captives, whose fate remains unknown.
As the conflict continues with no end in sight, Gaza’s hospitals, like Kamal Adwan, find themselves on the front lines, struggling against shrinking supplies and overstretched personnel to treat the unending flow of casualties. With each passing day, more and more of Gaza’s vital infrastructure, from health facilities to water and sewage systems, lies in tatters, raising fears of a looming humanitarian catastrophe.
