Dec. 28 (UPI) — The director of the last operating hospital in the northern Gaza Strip has been arrested by Israel Defense Forces after patients there were forcibly removed, Palestinian health officials said Saturday.
Dr. Hossam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was arrested by “occupation forces,” the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a Facebook post.
The reported arrest came after the facility was subjected to “a suffocating siege” in which its operations, surgery, laboratories, maintenance facilities, ambulances and warehouses were “completely burned down,” according to the Hamas-aligned health authority.
The medics accused the IDF of “forcibly transferring patients and injured under threat of weapons and gun nozzles to the Indonesian Hospital, which lacks medical supplies, water, medicine, and even electricity and generators.”
The Israeli military, however, said in a statement issued Saturday that its operation at Kamal Adwan Hospital has resulted in the arrest of 240 “terrorists” and had confirmed it was being used as a Hamas “terror stronghold and a shelter for terrorists, despite repeated calls to refrain from military use of medical facilities.”
The IDF said members of its 401st Brigade Combat Team and 13th Battalion surrounded the hospital, “arrested terrorists hiding in the area and eliminated additional terrorists.”
Israeli forces said they found and confiscated weapons in and around the facility, including grenades, pistols, ammunition and other military equipment. Some of the Hamas fighters arrested “tried to impersonate patients and medical staff” while others attempted to escape in an ambulance.
Some 95 patients, companions and staff members were evacuated from the facility during the operation and taken to Indonesian Hospital, where 5,000 liters of fuel, two generators and medical equipment were supplied to operate the facility, the IDF said.
“The IDF will continue to strictly adhere to the rules of international law towards medical facilities, including those where Hamas has chosen to locate its terrorist infrastructure, in flagrant violation of the rules of international law,” it said.
The Palestinians on Saturday claimed that patients taken to the second hospital suffered “a cruel night,” saying they are “in a very bad and difficult situation, where there is no water, electricity, no blanket, no food, no supplies, and the countdown to losing their lives has begun.”
The IDF has detained “most of the health staff so that they do not join the patients in the hospital,” the officials said.
