Gaza hospital blast: Doctors recount horror amid conflicting claims by Israel, Islamic Jihad

Fadel Naim, the head of orthopaedic surgery at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza, had just completed an operation when he heard a huge explosion and his department erupted in cries for assistance. “People came running into the surgery department screaming help us, help us, there are people killed and wounded inside the hospital,” he told the media. He found the hospital full of dismembered bodies and wounded people. “We tried to save whoever could be saved but the number was too great for the hospital team,” he said. The explosion on Tuesday resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians and ruined a diplomatic mission by U.S. President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel on Wednesday to bring peace to the area but was ignored by Arab leaders, who cancelled off an emergency summit. Palestinian sources attributed the explosion to an Israeli air strike. Israel claimed that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad was to responsible for the explosion after a failed missile launch, although the group rejected this. The 100-year-old Baptist Hospital was a source of pride for Doctor Ibrahim Al-Naqa. It offered patients access to a chapel and a mosque while welcoming people of all faiths in a troubled area. People entered the hospital to their deaths on Tuesday as they sought refuge from the heaviest violence between the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in decades. In a setting that was often calm and supportive of patients’ recovery, blood marred the walls and the floor. “This place created a safe haven for women and children, those who escaped the Israeli bombing into this hospital, those who saw this place as a safe haven,” said Naqa. “Without warning this hospital was targeted. We don’t know what the shell is called but we saw the results of it when it targeted children and ripped their bodies into pieces.” The hospital explosion resulted in protests erupting throughout the wider region, notably in Jordan and Turkey, and had by far the highest death toll of any single occurrence in Gaza during the recent conflict. The attack sparked a crisis in the area as Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, attacked villages in southern Israel on October 7 and murdered at least 1,300 people while taking hostages. In response, Israel launched its largest airstrikes ever on the blockaded Gaza Strip and gathered a large number of soldiers and tanks at its border. The Israeli military released proof of the hospital explosion being caused by a Palestinian missile that had been accidentally fired on Wednesday. An Islamic Jihad official dismissed Israeli charges as “cover to justify carrying out its massacres against Palestinian civilians” and denied that it was an Israeli air attack. Hamas claimed responsibility for the incident. Prior to Tuesday’s explosion, health officials in Gaza estimated that the 11 days of Israeli bombardment had claimed at least 3,000 lives. Even by the standards of the recent days, which have bombarded the globe with nonstop images of Israelis killed in their homes and subsequently of Palestinian families buried under debris as a result of Israel’s retaliatory attacks, the scenes of destruction from the hospital were horrifying. Around 300 hospital deaths were reported by the head of Gaza’s civil defence, whereas 500 were reported by sources in the health ministry. On Wednesday, people were still removing bodies from the debris. “The massacre carried out by the Israeli occupation at the Baptist Hospital is the massacre of the 21st century and it is a continuation of its crimes since the Nakba of our people in 1948,” said Salama Marouf, head of the Hamas government media office. The 1948 war that preceded the founding of Israel is known as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” and it was during this conflict that several Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes. (With agency inputs)