Battle of Khan Younis threatens biggest hospital still functioning in Gaza

GAZA/DOHA – Israeli forces advancing into the southern Gaza Strip’s main city pounded areas near the biggest hospital still functioning in the enclave on Jan 18, sending patients and residents fleeing a battle they feared would lay the city to waste.

The heaviest battle of 2024 so far is under way in Khan Younis, sheltering the hundreds of thousands who fled the north earlier in the war, now in its fourth month.

Residents described heavy fighting and intense bombardment in the north and east of the city and, for the first time, in the west, where they said tanks had advanced to carry out a raid before withdrawing.

The Israeli military said a brigade in Khan Younis, now operating further south than troops had ventured before, had “eliminated dozens of terrorists in close-quarters combat and with the assistance of tank fire and air support”.

The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which has doctors at the city’s Nasser Hospital, said patients and displaced people sheltering there were fleeing in panic.

In Rafah, further south, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are now crammed into a small city by the Egyptian border, 16 bodies were laid out on the bloodstained cobbles outside a morgue, most in white shrouds, a few in body bags.

A branch of the Zameli family had been wiped out in a strike that destroyed their home overnight. Half the bundles were tiny, holding the bodies of small children.

A grey-haired man howled in sorrow as he clung to one of the bodies, burying his face in the face of the shrouded corpse. A woman in a pink headscarf keened and stroked one of the shrouds.

At the scene of the bombing, the home had been completely obliterated. A girl’s tattered princess schoolbag lay in the rubble. Tears rolled down the cheeks of 10-year-old Mahmoud al-Zameli, who lived next door and had escaped.

“Yesterday, I was playing with the children over there. They have all died,” he sobbed.

“I’m the only one still alive.”

More than three months into a war that has killed over 24,000 Palestinians and laid much of the Gaza Strip to waste, Israel has said it is

planning to wind down its ground operations and shift to smaller-scale tactics

.

But before doing so, it appears determined to capture all of Khan Younis, which Israel says is a main base for the Hamas fighters who

attacked southern Israel on Oct 7, 2023,

and killed at least 1,200 people. Around 240 people were also taken hostage.

An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that, while Israel had already shifted to smaller-scale operations in Gaza’s north, the fierce battle for Khan Younis was likely to rage on for up to two months.

Nearly all of Gaza’s population has now been penned into two small areas: Rafah, just south of Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah just north of it.

Israel has given no indication of whether it intends to storm those towns but says it will not stop fighting until it has eradicated Hamas, an aim Palestinians say is unachievable given the group’s diffuse structure and deep roots.

Israelis marked the first birthday of the youngest hostage, Kfir Bibas, who was not among the scores of women and children released during a

week-long truce in late November

.

Hamas says Kfir, his four-year-old brother Ariel and their mother Shiri were killed in an Israeli air strike but, unlike in the cases of other slain hostages, has not released images confirming their deaths.

“His whereabouts are unknown,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland, sitting next to a photograph of the baby. “I call upon the entire universe to work endlessly to free Kfir and all the hostages.”

Fighting approaches key hospital

Khan Younis residents said on Jan 18 the fighting had come closer than ever to Nasser Hospital, the biggest hospital still working in the enclave.

It has raised fears the facility would fall under siege and be shut like Al Shifa, the main hospital in the north,

captured by Israeli forces last November

.

Israeli officials have accused Hamas fighters of operating from Nasser Hospital, which staff deny. Israel made similar accusations in November about Al Shifa, before subjecting it to a siege lasting days and storming it.

“What is happening in Khan Younis now is complete madness: the occupation bombards the city in all directions, from the air and the ground,” said Mr Abu El-Abed, 45, displaced several times with his family of seven since leaving Gaza City in the north earlier in the war.

“It is similar to what happened in Gaza before they took control of Al Shifa hospital,” he said by phone from Rafah, farther south, where he was looking for supplies and scouting for possible places to move his family again. “In the last three days, they have destroyed complete residential districts in the centre of the city and also in the eastern town of Abassan.”

Khan Younis itself is cut off from communication by a week-old mobile phone and Internet blackout. Gazans can communicate with the outside only by accessing Egyptian or Israeli mobile networks close to the border fence.

The Israeli military said it had killed 60 fighters in the previous 24 hours, including 40 in Khan Younis. The figures were impossible to verify but give an idea of the location and intensity of the fighting.

Two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals, including all medical facilities in the northern half of the enclave, have already ceased functioning altogether, and the rest are only partly functional. Losing Nasser would sharply curtail the limited trauma care still available for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.

“According to MSF’s surgeon in Nasser hospital, last night Israeli forces heavily bombed the area close to the hospital with no prior evacuation order, causing patients and many of the thousands of displaced civilians who had sought refuge in Nasser to flee in a panic,” the medical charity said on X, formerly Twitter.

In a video that included footage of dark columns of smoke rising above crowded central Khan Younis, MSF’s mission head for Palestine Leo Cans, who reached the hospital, said the fighting had come “very close”.

“We hear a lot of bombing around. A lot of shooting around,” he said. “The wounded people that we take care of, many of them lost their legs, lost their arms. There are really complex wounds that require a lot of surgery. And we don’t have the capacity to do this now. The situation has to stop.” REUTERS