The Israeli military struck and destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops fighting elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the southern Gaza Strip, severing links between two strategically located Palestinian cities.
No one was killed in the attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital, but a child being treated for a head injury died because of the rushed evacuation, according to a statement released by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, which oversees the medical center. The strike destroyed a laboratory and damaged a pharmacy, the emergency department and a church at the hospital compound in Zeitoun, the statement added.
The hospital had become one of the last mainstays of the health care system in Gaza, where medical centers have been frequently damaged and besieged during the war that began with the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged during the war, and only 21 remained partly functional. The W.H.O. also warned on Saturday that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.
The Ahli Arab Hospital compound was first hit less than two weeks into the war, when a missile hit a parking lot on the site where dozens of displaced families were sheltering. Hamas blamed the strike on Israel, before Israel said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. U.S. intelligence officials later said they had “high confidence” in the Israeli account.
The Israeli military acknowledged responsibility on Sunday for the latest strike on the hospital, saying without offering evidence that the site had housed a Hamas command center. Both the military and the Anglican Church said that Israeli soldiers had called the hospital to order its evacuation before the strike. Neither the hospital authorities nor Hamas responded to questions about whether the hospital had been used by Hamas fighters.
In a separate development, the Israeli defense minister announced on Saturday the capture of a strategic east-west thoroughfare in southern Gaza. That severs links between Rafah and Khan Younis, the two major cities in southern Gaza, and expands Israel’s occupation in that part of the enclave.
Israel calls the thoroughfare the “Morag Corridor,” after a Jewish settlement in the area that was disbanded when Israeli troops evacuated Gaza in 2005.
The defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel had placed the entire region between the corridor and the Gaza-Egypt border — an area of some 25 square miles — within “Israel’s security zone.” The military said it had encircled the city of Rafah but had yet to establish operational control of every neighborhood.
Before breaking the cease-fire with Hamas in March, Israeli troops controlled only a sliver of land in southern Gaza along the territory’s borders with Egypt and Israel. But they began to expand their control in early April in what Israeli leaders said was a bid to pressure Hamas into releasing roughly 60 hostages — some believed to be dead — still held in the enclave.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
